Yesterday I went on a boat, and I think it was in Milford Sound. It's hard to tell because it was raining so much that you couldn't see much from the boat. They say that going to Milford on a rainy day is good because there are lots of waterfalls. I guess that's true, there were definitely lots of waterfalls, but it didn't help that half of them were running down the windows ofthe boat, stopping me from seeing out! Didn't actually go outside because if I did I would have got soaked - my friend Kat took one for the team and went outside for like a minute to get us some pics, and came back very wet and without any decent pictures, cos it was too rainy!

So my trip to the apparently gorgeous Milford Sound wasn't too successful. The bus trip there wasn't too bad though cos they were right about the waterfalls on the mountains - they were pretty cool.

Today was a long day. After the Milford tour yesterday, I stayed overnight in Te Anau (another town on a lake). Myself and Nanna (another girl from my bus) got a connection to Invercargill on the south coast at 7am. it was there that we were picked up for our tour of the Catlins - the south-east coast of the South Island. At first we thought that we were gonna get a private tour for just the two of us, but turned out that Nanna wasn't actually on the list, but the guy had just assumed that we were to two people he was looking for. We had to go back and pick up another girl who he'd left standing outside the information centre in Invercargill! It was still pretty cool to have only 3 of us though cos Roger (the guide) asked us what we wanted to see. The main thing Nanna and I wanted to do was go to the southernmost point of the South Island of NZ - which is probably the furthest south i will ever be! On the way to Slope Point though, I started to wonder if it was worth it because we suddenly got caught in a massive downpour and were soaked through. On top of that, we had to deal with really strong winds at the coast. It was really hard to take pics of the sign that said it was the southermost point, because it was so windy!

The next stop was Curio Bay, where there is a petrified forest. It wasn't quite as impressive looking as the fake one i saw in Aus but at least this one was real. Apparently the tide was quite high and its easier to make out the fossilised trees at low tide, but we still saw a few fossilised logs in the ground. We also stopped at a waterfall and for a walk along a beach, which had loads of massive seaweed all over it, that we decided looked like giant squids! Next stop was Cannibal Bay where we saw a few sea lions lazing about on the beach. The last place we stopped was Nugget Point which was one of the highlights. A short walk out to the lighthouse was along quite a narrow bit of land with the sea on each side - down one side of which there was seals. We then went back down the hill a bit to a lookout for yellow-eyed penguins. Apparently they are pretty rare, so it was cool to see one standing in the grass on the hill, having come back in frmo the sea.

I'm now in Dunedin, which is a Scottish city which was apparently based on Edinburgh (Dunedin means Edinburgh of the south) but I'm assured by someone who's been there that it's not much like it.