New Zealand Road Trip Day 4: Leaving Aoraki, to Timaru and Oamaru

It is still raining non stop. After having breakfast with muesli and milk, we decided to cancel the Blue and Tasman Lake Track hiking as we don't want to get wet again. Then we will have quite a lot of time if we go straight to Oamaru. Then we decided to go to the Timaru to pick paua. Driving to Timaru take 2 hours of time.

Breakfast

Lookout Point of Lake Pukaki

When we reach Timaru, we fund a place called Milford Hut to cook and have our lunch.

At the Milford Hut campsite, this is the toilet without tap water

At least have a table for picnic

Enjoy view and cook lunch

Mee with tomato, seaweed and alpine smoke salmon

Herd of cows

Then we drive to the place call Jack Surf Point. Walking down to the beach at the low tide time, we managed to pick 2 paua after find for almost an hour.It is quite hard to find as the wave is so big and water is so cold. The rock is also very slippery too.

A signboard for legal pick Paua

A beach full of rock

First Paua 

Paua

Then we straight depart to the Oamaru after changing clothes during halfway. At the Oamaru, we bought something at the Countdown and warehouse. Then we drove to the Yellow Eye Penguin Colony. There are a lot of sea lions and we managed to see three penguins from far far away.

Yellow eyed penguin colony view from the top

Sleeping seal

Swimming seal

Seal crawl onto the beach

Seals fighting

Yellow-eyed penguin, I used micro four third 300mm lens to zoom. Actually, it was quite far, only a tiny spot with our eyes

At 7pm, we leave the place and departed to campsite for the night at Kakanui. The campsite only cost $15 per person and have good kitchen, laundry and shower facilities. We had break a record of 3 days not taking shower. Finally, we have a good place to take shower but is very cold shower. The hot shower will cost another $2 for 6 minutes. After shower, we did our laundry and cook for the dinner. The dinner tonight is quite a lot with Mi Hun Kueh with Paua, Fried Paua with capsicum and some beers.

Kakanui campsite, a wide area of camp site

The kitchen, laundry and toilets are in this building

The dining table and sofa

Kitchen

Dinner

Since tonight facilities is quite good, we decided to stay here for blogging and update our Facebook status. We also found out that the heavy rain yesterday at Mount Cook area had cause a bridge to collapse at Franz Josef. Hence, we may need to change our journey route.