金琦之旅 Amazing Voyage: New Zealand Road Trip Day 7 - At Catlins : Florence Hill Lookout, Lake Wilkie, Slope Point and Curio Bay

I woke up at 4am try to see the milky way but it is too foggy that can’t see any star and it is damn cold. My hand is shivering. Then we wake up at 8am and make the potato omelette with bread as breakfast. After took several photos with the sheep, we depart to the McLean Falls.

Hillview campsite in the morning

Breakfast

Cows and sheep in the hillview at campsite

At halfway, we stopped at the Florence Hill Lookout point. The view is really amazing and we saw a herd of sheep going to the same direction.

Florence Hill Lookout

The view is spectacular

Cows and sheep are everywhere

They walk in a line!

When we reached the entrance of the McLean Falls, the signal board is written with track closed but I still insist to drive in. After 3km drive on the rocky road, we really see the track closed. Then we plan to go to the Cathedral cave, but it open at 2:45pm as it have to wait until low tide to get in to the cave. That time is only 11:30am. Hence, we went to the Lake Wilkie which we just passed by just now.

McLean Falls is closed!

Track to Lake Wilkie

Lake Wilkie

Then we have lunch at the papatowai picnic area. After lunch, we booked for the Mildord sound cruise through the bookme while waiting the cathedral gate to be open. Then we saw from a signboard that written the cathedral cave has an entrance fee. Then we found that the entrance fee is NZD5 and we cancelled this visit. We have wasted the time to wait for this gate opening.

Lunch

Then we decided to visit the slope point. The slope point is walking through a private sheep farm land from the car park. It only have a sign board that written how far from the equator and south pole.

The view along the way to slope point, it have nice composition between green field and blue sky

Slope Point

After that, we drive to the Curio Bay Campground that we will stay for a night. It cost NZD35 for two person unpowered site. After selected the point, we straight away go to bath as we don’t want to bath at night as it will be very cold.

After that, we walked to the petrified forest and managed to see the yellow eye penguins. This is the closest penguins that we see but is around an 100meter away.

Can you see the penguin

Penguin with 150mm zoom lens

Petrified Forest

After that, we just sit at the bay and eating chip to try to watch for the dolphin. We were unlucky there is no dolphin appear and hence we just leave as the sky going to be dark and getting colder. Then we have a nice cooked dinner that is the cabonara spaghetti with dried chicken and broccoli.