New Zealand - Invercargill (Curio Bay's Petrified Forest and Yellow-Eyed Penguins)

What a day! I got to satisfy my not-so-secret penguin fetish, see a petrified forest, and find some tessellated pavement. Yes, tessellated. Tessellated. Giggle! I do love saying tessellated so was pretty excited to have a good excuse to start saying it again since it's been a long time since our Tasmania trip.

It was a rather long drive to Invercargill as we first had to go over the Cardrona Range, past Queenstown, drive south along a long, long arm of Lake Wakatipu, and then keep driving south seemingly forever until we hit Invercargill. From there, we had to head towards Fortrose and then Curio Bay is past that "a ways". Unfortunately the sign to Fortrose in Invercargill (or any other burg in that direction) seemed to be missing so we powered right on by the road towards Fortrose. The map we had was not too terribly good in the detail department which was working decidedly to our disadvantage. We got to where we could see what we thought was Bluff in the distance and realized we had to have missed the turn somewhere. Bleah! It was a long enough drive without adding any extra kilometers to it. So much for being in the information age because we sure didn't have enough of it.

After we righted our ship and topped off with petrol, we found the right road and headed that way. We had an appointment with some penguins and we were not going to miss it! The last umpti-ump kilometers of the drive were gravel, but I didn't mind because we were heading toward penguins. There was, however, a voice in the back of my head saying something about "not being happy if there aren't any penguins". Oh wait, that was not in my head. That was behind my head. It was A.J., and others in the car were adding their agreement. Oh please let there be penguins because, apparently, petrified forests do not qualify as awesome enough to justify hours of driving!

We finally got to Curio Bay, jumped out of the car, and headed for the beach. When we got to the shore we discovered it was quite nippy; not at all like our beach at home. We wandered around enjoying the petrified forest, the tessellated pavement (well, maybe that was just me), and the beauty of the ruggedness there. Definitely a very cool place, but the thing on all our minds was no surprise... penguins.

As it started teetering towards dusk, we found our penguin lookout on a very conveniently located rock formation. I like how one of those two is always watching the water. We hadn't been at that post very long at all before we spotted one. Yippee!!! I had the most wonderful time watching the penguins. We ended up watching three before we called it a day. I took lots and lots of shots of these guys although somehow I managed to miss getting a shot of an epic penguin fail pulled off by penguin #2. He tried to hop up a ledge that was a bit too high for him and then fell over backwards onto his back. He immediately got back up, shook himself off, and successfully tried a ledge that wasn't quite so tall. At no time did I see him looking around to see if any other penguins had seen his gaffe like so many of us humans would do. I guess maybe penguins are secure enough in themselves that they don't care what other penguins think of them.

The penguins we were seeing were the pretty rare yellow-eyed penguins. They only live in New Zealand and they are just plain awesome! They come into shore after a hard day at work with take-home pay of whatever they can fit into their stomach. They're greeted by their mate who has stayed home all day to guard the chicks and then the breadwinner of the day feeds their little ones from their "take-home pay". The next day the parents reverse roles and do it all over again. This goes on for six weeks until the chicks are old enough to babysit themselves. After that it takes both parents "working outside the home" to keep their teenagers fed (sound familiar?).

I delighted in watching them waddle up towards their rookery and taking some pretty seriously big hops up the ledges. They're much better hopper-uppers than I would have thought. About halfway there, he/she started doing the "Honey, I'm home." call. Yes, this all was way up there on the happiness scale for me.

I eventually tore myself away, but it was admittedly hard. I wanted to stay and watch penguins arrive all evening, but if had, I'd have been walking to our next destination. We had planned Milford Sound next so we were heading to Te Anau to spend the night and then launch for Milford Sound from there. That would be assuming the road to it was open and hadn't encountered a landslide like it had a day or two before.

We had quite a day for sure. To add to all those amazing things, it was also the farthest south any of us have ever been. I had mistakenly thought I'd never get any farther south than we were in Tasmania, but I was definitely wrong. We beat it by a few degrees even. Curio Bay is at about 46 degrees, 39 minutes, and 43.2 seconds south for those who want the nitty-gritty numbers.