The Soaking Southern Point

November 19^th, 2019

When I was a kid and my family returned to England to visit our grandparents, I always remember heading to Lands End in Cornwall, the most western point of the country.  There was a touristy signpost there with arrows pointing in all different directions with the name of a city and how far away it was such as “New York 3147 miles” etc.  I don’t know why but I found it fascinating to think of the distances between places.

The view from my campsite that morning:

I saw that there was a similar sign at the southernmost tip of the south island so of course I had to check it out.  It happened to be only a five minute drive from the Freedom Camping spot at that I rolled into once Betty 2.0 had been freed the day before.  It was raining a bit when I arrived but it looked like the whole day was going to be rainy so I put on my raincoat and grabbed my umbrella to walk the 400 some meters out to the point.  As I was three quarters of the way there, the winds and the rain really picked up.  Oh well, I’m committed now.

 The southern point:

Still a long way to go to the pole.

So I've actually been flipping every picture and video of my trip in New Zealand up to this point before posting it on my blog...here's what it really looks like here:

It was interesting to see that this point is just a bit over halfway to the south pole from the equator…wow.  So the expeditions like Scott and Shackleton heading off from Lyttleton in the early 1900s still had a hell of a long way to go!  Okay, it’s really raining hard now, time to go.

The cows seemed to be used to it. 

I drove another hour or so to reach the small city of Invercargill, boasting a population of 55,000.  It was a good day to do errands and I was amazed that I was able to spend the entire afternoon running around but it was definitely productive.

On the drive to Invercargill, the Pukeko (the type of baby bird I ran over a week or two ago) seemed to be haunting me...

After my ordeal of getting stuck yesterday in Betty 2.0, I opted to shell out forty bucks for this potential life saver.

The Freedom Camping spot I picked was about 30 clicks out of town and was by a swollen river but thanks to the weather I pretty much just stayed holed up in my van but it was a quiet place to sleep.