21 Feb 05
Day 6 of our roadtrip and we've already put over 1000 km on our little car. After attending the Shins concert at the U. of Canterbury in Christchurch we got up early and headed south.

We'd gotten into a bit of a slump, and had fallen into the mentality that all of the tourists here seem to be in.SEE EVERYTHING...and traveling just to travel becomes meaningless pretty quickly. So, we've decided to slow down, get further off of the beaten track, turn down dirt roads and go wherever the wind blows.

The wind seems to be keeping us on the coast; we've been seeing tons of marine life. We saw baby fur seals playing at Nugget Point, south of Dunedin. Two species of penguin live down in this area, the Blue Penguin and the Yellow-Eyed Penguin, they have eluded us so far, but I'm determined to get a glimpse of them.

Last night we found ourselves in a place called Curio Bay, near the southernmost point of the south island, we decided to stop and stay there for the night. Our place was right on the beach. This morning we rented surfboards and wetsuits (the water is about 52 degrees F. down here!) and tried surfing yet again. The water was FREEZING, but it didn't mater, after a minute or 2 my extremities were numb and I was much more concerned about the huge waves pounding down on my head. We tried to catch a few of the waves, but they were clearly WAY out of our league so we moved toward shore and surfed the smaller stuff, practicing our balance and turning.

Not far offshore lives a pod of Hector dolphins, they are the smallest and most rare dolphin in the world. There are estimated to be only 3-4 thousand left in total! We saw them jumping just beyond where we were "surfing", they were amazing, playing in the waves just like us! So we decided to paddle out just beyond the waves to get a little closer to them. We watched them for a moment and then they approached us! There were about four of them just circling around me, inches from my legs after they had checked me out they went over and did the same to Jim. It was incredible to be so close to such amazing animals!