Bluff

While staying at the NZMCA Park in Invercargill, we decided to do a day trip to Bluff as it had been years since we were there. There are three things that struck us this time:

1/ A lot of money and effort had been spent beautifying the town with murals

2/ The age of the town – lots of old buildings and houses and not a lot of maintenance

3/ The lack of people.

Our first stop was to the lookout. It was a very steep, narrow and windy road to the top but the views were great.

I let Bruce tackle the drive down and we then went out to Sterling Point. Neither of us had been there before and it was a great little place with a cute light house, and a length of what I assume was supposed to be sterling chain.

There was also a solitary seal mooching around in the seaweed trying to find his lunch. Despite my best efforts I wasn’t able to get a decent photo of him.

We stopped off at the restaurant here and had lunch and were able to watch the few intrepid fishermen trying to catch a feed from the rocks, (we never saw any signs of success), and what we guessed were the oyster boats making their way back in to port.

The township itself was, as I said, largely abandoned, but we had a walk around and noticed a few quirky things such as these two notices:

The murals were lovely and probably the high point of the town

However, everywhere there were signs of neglect – a hotel with broken windows, a house almost falling down and a factory looking overgrown with vegetation.

The highlight for the day for Bruce was probably being able to purchase a dozen fresh Bluff oysters that he cooked for dinner. All in all, a lovely day!