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

The Wolves Within (The Holy Bag Part 2)

We watched a DVD last night called "The Pursuit of Happyness"-if you have seen the film you will understand why happiness is misspelt- and it got me thinking about one of my previous posts called "The Holy Bag". I remembered an e-mail that a friend of ours, Rory, sent around one New Years. It was a parable told by a Cherokee Indian about two wolves and I thought the message was similar to that of the Dalai Lama's.

I couldn't find the original e-mail so I literally typed in "two wolves fighting inside me" and got a load of hits with the parable therein. The Internet is just incredible. Here's the parable.


An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."


There's even another version of the story which is even closer to the parable told by the Dalai Lama here.

Perhaps the Dalai Lama was a Cherokee Indian in a former life?

Cathal