Chocolatefalls
One of my favorite spots in Israel lies in the middle of the desert. You cross the city of Yeruham eastwards, and after 10 minutes you reach the rim of the Great Crater. It is unnecessary to stop at the Mount Avnun Lookout - you won’t see it from there (and the views aren’t that amazing, between us). Go straight down to the crater, drive exactly one minute and stop the car. On the hill-slope to your right, hidden from the road, lies Israel’s biggest - and surprisingly almost unknown - fossilized forest. I can stay on this hillslope huge amounts of time, surrounded by the emptiness of the desert, sitting on an impressive petrified tree, a few meters large, absorving the atmosphere.
Which can’t be said about the petrified forest that lies at the southern part of New-Zealand, at an area called ‘Catlins’. The most impressive thing about it is its location: in a small bay (called Curio Bay), and visible only at low tide - which is the real issue: it is under the water, and only a few hours a day you can access it - but the views are not at all close to Israel’s petrified forest, and not even to the one I’ve seen in Australia.
The Catlins area is an extraordinary example to how a good tourist ministry should work. The area is indeed nice - but for me it was not exceptional, and certainly did not meet the high expactations I got after hearing what everybody says about it. The most beautiful part was the wildlife - colonies of sea-lions, seals, dolphins, sea-birds, and presumably penguins (I actually only got to see them north of the Catlins, as I will describe shortly); the sites that require low-tide access are, at least in my opinion, worth seeing if you happen to be there at the correct time - but don’t alter your plans just to be there - not at the petrified forest, and certainly not at the so-called Cathedral Caves, which are caves that can be accessed through a coast only at the low tide. Over all, the area is nice but was a bit disappointing, as I expected more than it has to offer.
Before reaching the Catlins we drove from Fiordland (where, before leaving the area, I saw a wonderful half-an-hour nature-movie, only music and helicopter-made pictures, going through Fiordland with some really dramatic shots. Highly recommended. We also had there a lovely evening at a pub with Nele, the belgian girl from the Kepler Track) south to Invercargil. We phoned there Michael and Ellen, the german couple we met at the Milford Track, and found out that their car had broken and they were stuck near Invercargil. We stayed one day at that city and helped them buy a new car, then we continued to travel through the Catlins together. They are an extremely nice couple, and I am glad we stayed to help there - they were good company for the past few days, until our ways separated earlier today.
At Invercargil I also got to sort of a quarrel with Shlomi. Nothing too serious, but we are very different and we both like to have things our way so for some period a tension was built. Anyhow it is fine - we continue on until Friday.
After the Catlins we arrived at Dunedin. This is a nice city. Instead of a city square it has a city octagon (the main square is octagonal - very neat). It is the house of a small university, of the world’s steepest street (it actually appears at the Guinness Book Of Records. This is how you promote tourism! what the hell went through the mind of thir city engineer???), and most important - this city is the home to the Cadburry Chocolate Factory.
It is probably a common knowledge, that like 90% of the population I also have the slightest chocolate-addiction. The factory tour is fully aware of this fact and knows to use it well and to meet the expectations - they begin by giving you a plastic bag, and in every stop they just thow into it another chocolate bar, just for the fun. This includes things like giving you a small chocolate when you have to climb the stairs to the next floor (you need energy…), handing a bar if you answer any question the guide asks you, or other things of the sort. The smell is gorgeous, and the crazy thing comes at the end: you climb to a huge silo (one out of three), where they keep over a ton of liquid chocolate just for the tours, and then they turn the pile over and you observe a chocolate-fall that lasts over half a minute. Pure pleasure.
After the excellent chocolate tour we headed to the Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin, to observe an albatros colony. We got to the point, but then it turned out that you can only go inside in a guided tour that was fully booked. We didn’t feel like waiting two hours just to see this colony, so we headed back, and went north to a small village, where we booked a place on an extremely nice hostel Shuli (whom we met at the Frantz-Josef Glacier) recommended us - it is called Olive’s Grove, and I fully join her recommendation. At Olive’s we took a wildlife tour, without doubt the best since we left Fiordland, and went to see Penguin Colonies.
There are several funny facts about penguins. For one, they spend all the day hunting at the sea, so you can only see them at dusk (when they come out for the night) or extremely early in the morning - when decent men are sleeping. That is, if you don’t come at the middle of the summer (around March) where they mould - loose all their feathers at once so they can’t get into the sea and have to wait on the land for about 6 weeks until they are waterproof again; during that time they starve almost to death, unless they are at the colony we saw today, which has a penguin-hospital on top of it and a nice Kiwi that sees if they are too weak and treats them.
We saw two kinds of Penguins: the yellow-eyed (I believe they are considered the most rare of all Penguin species) and the small blue ones. The blue are really opportunistic: the hill where they live is full of rabbits, and they just take over rabbit holes and use them, The yellow-eyed gave the best show, as we could actually see them coming out of the water - swimming into the land, then realizing there are no more water and standing up, then hoping into the bush. Really funny.
Apart from the two types of penguins the place there have numerous types of seals, and many sea-birds. It is absolutely gergeous, and this tour should not be missed - actually, you can just skip all the other, more touristic, ‘penguin-watching’ things they offer at Dunedin and go straight to this one.
Tommorow we plan to stay most of the day on the coastal area near Omaru, and then we will head inland again, to the last big area of New-Zealand I plan to see in this visit - Mount Cook.
