My Summer Holiday – Part 9 (Seals, shags, boulders and no penguins…)

Unwilling to give up and unwilling to compromise, our annoying co-driver made a detour to a place called Shag Point halfway through the journey. If you think this is the place where you can see couples shagging each other, then you will be sorely disappointed. What you get is colonies of seals, yellow-eyed penguins and a flock of sea birds call shags.

Shag Point used to be a coal mining area and it has been disused ever since. The place is riddled with old mine shafts and if you do not watch where you step, you will surely fall into one of them.

Much to our co-driver’s disappointment, the penguins were nowhere in sight. He only managed to see a bunch of seals lying lazily on the rocks. The shags are smarter as they chose to perch on the reefs further away from us. Still, he insisted on driving to another lookout a few hundred meters up the road because he thought that is where the penguins will appear. When we reached there, what he saw was seaweeds, rocky cliffs and thundering surfs.

After wasting more than 30 minutes, we move on. Along the way, the pesky co-driver tried to watch for penguin watching road signs and tried to persuade the driver to go there. Luckily, our driver has some horse senses and he refused flatly.

By the time we reached Moeraki, the annoying co-driver insisted turning into the road towards the beach. He said he wanted to show us something. After a 300 meters trek on the sandy beach, we saw a bunch of funny round boulders nestled along the shore. The boulders had many weird looking carvings on the surface. A couple of them broke into pieces and what we saw inside was a co-web of clay, rock and yellowish crystals.

When we resumed our journey, we were very late. We stopped by Oamaru for a quick bite and hit the road. The drive from Oamaru to Twizel was a very pleasant one as the terrain was very flat. Along the way, I saw beautiful reservoirs and striking mountain ranges basking in the golden sunset light. It is a shame that we had to drive past the beautiful scenery thanks to that bloody annoying co-driver who wasted so much of our traveling time.

Finally, we reached Twizel and it was very late. All the shops were closed and we had nowhere to go but to checked into the motel and retired for the night…