I Heart Penguins and Sea Lions... Curio Bay

Friday we woke up and got on the green bus with possibly the most annoying person I've ever been around, the driver. Now how do you avoid that? Yikes... We took a walk down to Nugget Point which has since become one of my favorite views in New Zealand. This area was given it's name by Captain Cook because the story goes that when he saw the rocks in the Pacific with the sun behind them, they looked like golden nuggets. What do you think? We then took a walk down to Surat Bay to see if there were any Sea Lions sunning on the beach. Well, as luck would have it, we saw 3 of them just chilling.

After lunch, we went to a few other lookouts towards a beach, a lake, and a waterfall and then drove on towards Curio Bay. We walked down to the water and the driver pointed out a fossil forest (160 million years old) estimated to have been from the ancient continent Gondawonaland.

Finally, before settling in to our accomodation, Dolphin Lodge, we saw the rarest and 3rd largest penguins in the world, the yellow-eyed penguin. They were coming in from a long day at sea. How Cute!