The German stalking family.
As well as rescuing old German ladies in the middle of the night the expedition manager has also been rescuing young German infants, well those ones that want to stray from their Mummies and Daddies and head for the main road. As we were sat in Te Anau we watched this young German toddler come strolling past our van and heading for the main gate, despite the language barrier Rosemarie was out of the blocks like a whippet and taking said German infant by the hand walked him back to his parents. Now Mummy and Daddy didn't seem all that concerned and Rosemarie was a trifle put out by their attitude as one can imagine, they scolded the young chap and just about managed to thank the tour manager.
Rather them than me!
From Invercargill we moved to Dunedin and there, taking over the kitchen for their evening meal, even though they have a huge motor home were the same family. They smiled rather weakly at us but refused to engage in conversation. We moved from Dunedin to Oamaru and lo and behold about an hour later the same family arrived. All well and good and at least they didn't try to take over the kitchen, but this morning as were leaving father had to sprint across the road to gather up one small male toddler just in case I ran him down, so maybe they haven't learnt their lesson at all and they may well be forced to take extra tuition from the expedition's health and safety manager!
The drive from Invercargill to Dunedin was interesting and we had great time. We saw a sea lion asleep on the beach and decided not to wake it. We saw several fur seals and on Curio Beach not only a petrified forest but even more importantly a rare yellow eyed penguin, who stood up for us pirouetted and immediately lay down again. A penguin laying down with his head turned away does not make for good photographs and the expedition's naturalist was not amused.
We did make it to the southern most point in New Zealand where the signpost assured us we were over 19000 miles from London. It was rather a tristful moment as we knew that we would now be heading North and homewards for the rest of our trip. Both of us were silent for quite a while.
We also some some marvellous waterfalls. All of these things were only achieved by using gravel roads which Vanessa really doesn't like and can only manage at atop speed of thirty kph. This is perfectly fine but it does ten to slow you down a bit and also make the van incredibly dirty. When we arrived at Invercargill it looked as though the van had just taken place in the Trans Sahara rally, you could not see out of the rear window at all.
All in all a grey day with a great deal of drizzle but some wonderful sights tinged with a little sadness.