Southern Scenic Route (15) Dunedin to the Catlins via Lake Waihola Day 5

Sharon told me that if I didn't blog about the South Island again soon people would think I had lost the plot. So in the interests of the blog I have put my "pursuit of happiness" to one side and decided to do a second post today.

The Southern Scenic Route runs for 400 km from Dunedin to Te Anau, via the Catlins and Invercargill. Te Anua being the gateway to Doubtful and Milford Sounds. The map below shows the route we more or less travelled.

The Southern Scenic Route was not the best road journey we took in my opinion, but it did offer up some treats, some of which were quite unexpected. What it did offer in abundance however was high winds and driving rain but we will have more on that in the next post.


Here's a pic of one of NZ's native birds, the Pekeko, that we spotted on our travels. I "borrowed" the picture from the Internet. They like wet marsh lands so it was no surprise that we spotted them along the South West Coast.




We were driving towards the Catlins when we came across a sign for a look out ahead and decided to pull over and have a look. Here's a pic from the lookout.

We thought the village in the distance, in the picture above, looked promising and as it was getting near Annette's feeding time- sorry Annette couldn't resist- we decided to head down to the lake and have some well earned beans on toast.

We pulled into a public car park beside Lake Waihola and I reversed the van so we had a good view of the lake from the "dining area" in the back of the camper van. As you can see I sort of reversed into a big pot hole so the camper van isn't exactly level. Well at least I didn't hit anything!

It was here I noticed the light was missing over the door and the few scrapes along the side of the van. See the Dunedin post to find out more. With views like the ones below however it didn't dampen my spirits for long.

As we were leaving we drove down past a holiday park and I thought the names on some of the vans were worth a pic.

Whether any of us would have called our camper van "our dream home" is debatable but it had it's moments. We headed from Lake Waihola onto Papatowai passing the picturesque down of Balclutha on the way.

We pulled into the camper van site in literally the middle of nowhere and settled in for the night. If parts of the south island are remote then the Catlins is the epitome of the South Island.

We battened down the hatches and settled in for a stormy night on NZ's south east coast.

Cathal