For one weekend adventure down to the Catlins (a national park) we had to rent a car. Seeing as only Michael and I were old enough to rent a car, it meant one of us would be driving. That ended up being me. At first, driving on the left is pretty freaky. I kept want to turn into the right lane and I'd get confused when turning onto roads. Thankfully one of my flatmates happens to be from the UK and she went with me, so she would yell at me everytime I went into the wrong lane. Eventually I figured it out and now it's pretty standard, but I do have to pay more attention to what lane I'm turning into and whatnot. Driving on the left is definitely an experience and is quite fun. It throws you off though because you drive on the right side of the car so you have no idea where the left side of your car is so I kept drifting far left but nothing to serious happened as a result. Also, the wipers and blinkers are on opposite sides so whenever I'd go to turn on my blinker I'd end up turning on my wipers which is quite confusing at first.
Anyways, the Catlins are our equivalent of a national park. It's about a 2 hour drive from Dunedin to get there. We got there at night so we weren't able to see what we were camping around, but we set up camp anyways and cooked food and had a great night. The next morning it was pretty windy so that woke up everyone up pretty early. When we got out of the tent it what we were camping on was essentially a river delta. There were big cliffs on either side of us with a really big and nice sandy beach in between with a river running through the middle of it. The beach was also inhabited by sea lions. At one point, I crossed the river (nobody else was man enough to cross it at that point) and began wandering this beach by myself. I started following some tracks in the sand because I had no idea what they were. Just before some grasslands I looked up and saw two or three (probably a family) of sea lions sleeping in the grass, no more than 15m away from me. I got a little freaked out because sea lions are big and if they charge you they can outrun you. And assuming it was a family I wasn't trying to get attacked, so I got out of there. I kept wandering and came across more sea lions either sleeping on the beach or doing whatever they do in the surf. I got some pictures, checked out some cliffs and then decided to head back across the river.
After I crossed, we began some more exploring. We found a rope swing that was on a hill and had a ton of fun on that for about an hour. I've never had more fun on a swing before and could have stayed there all day, but we had more exploring to do. The first place we went to was a waterfall that was about 10m tall and consisted of three sections. It was pretty neat but nothing to special. After that we drove for about 15 minutes to another waterfall. This one consisted of a 20 minute hike to get to it, and when we got there we were not disappointed. It was about 22m tall and was amazing. There were rocks all around it that we could climb on and some people even went swimming in the water at the bottom of it. We hiked up the side of the waterfall on a pretty steep hill and climbed out on a tree that was hanging over the top of the waterfall. It was incredibly freaky looking down but very cool. We hung around the waterfall for a good while and got plenty of pictures. After that we drove to a forest with a 'mirror' lake. I say that because what you saw in the water was an exact mirror image of the ground in front of it. It was very pretty and cool. We hiked around there for a little while before heading to petrified forest.
The petrified forest was kind of a let down because it wan't a real forest; the forest had been buried by volcanic ash thousands of years ago and we were walking on top of it. But what was cool was the beach directly off the ocean in front of it is also home to the rarest penguins in the world, the Yellow-eyed Penguin. These were really cool and we got pretty close to them (10m was as close as you could get to them and I was about that far). We hung out there for a little while before calling it a day.
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