The little tent that wanted to fly away

After last night's bad weather, the sun was back in the morning. We welcomed it with open arms, as a lot of our stuff was still wet. There was a strict 10:00 checkout time so at some point we had to leave. We visited Jack's blowhole, a canyon 200 meter inland with rough sea water. We didn't see a blowhole though as we've seen in small at other beaches, and neither did we see anyone called Jack, so it was slightly underwhelming, especially as it took 40 minutes of hiking to see it.

On the way to our next stop we drove through Papatowai. This town hosts the Lost Gypsy Gallery, a place where someone with lots of free time and creativity created lots of small or big toys that would move when either pressing a button or turning a handle. Very random and somehow cool.

After lunch we decided to visit only one of the many waterfalls, our choice were the McLean Falls. A short walk through awesome forest brought us there. Having seen plenty of living forests here, we also went to see a petrified forest at the coast. There were mainly tree stumps and some logs. Hard to really tell that they were stone and not still wood but the weird look in that specific location made the stop worth it.

We had been driving south for the last few weeks, now this came to an end, as we reached the southern most point of the South Island of New Zealand and didn't intend to visit Steward Island or Antarctica. From here on we noticed how incredibly windy it had gotten at the coast. Going west from here, we reached a nice little light house and found yet another sea lion. This time he was up for a selfie.

The campsite of the day tried everything to provide wind shelter for us. We were basically surrounded by trees, bushes, a campervan and our car. But it was nonetheless so windy that we had to go rock searching around midnight because our pegs were being pushed out of the ground by pure wind force. When we were trying to fall asleep, we noticed one of the corners at the feet was not attached anymore. We secured the 4 main pegs with one rock each and hoped we'd survive the night.Read more