MAVORA LAKES!!!
Well that's what we would have seen if it had not been foggier than a mug outside. It was still pretty cool though because it really did look Lord of the Rings style. We went for a bit of a tramp along the North Mavora Lake but I wasn't really wearing proper shoe attire to tramp 3 hours to the South Lake. Turns out, walking across uneven ground in Converse for a long time kills your feet. So back to the car we went!...... After crossing a creepy swing bridge for the second time that day.
The drive back to the main highway was pretty much a living hell. I guess in New Zealand their idea of a gravel road is a road that has approximately 8 inches of gravel that isn't really gravel but instead giant boulders. Don't worry, I only almost went in the ditch twice..... and I wasn't even driving fast! The first time, I admit, I was going a bit fast and got sucked in a little bit and bounced of some weeds and maybe a little bit of ground, but the second time. Not my fault. The gravel just suuuuuckkkkked me in all the way to the side, where Ferdinand was basically waist deep in the gravel. Getting out was easy, but the noise that he made when we were stopped was not normal or pretty, so we lifted the hood to check out what was going on. I know a little bit about cars, thanks to my dad, but not really enough to determine if something is actually wrong, but looking inside the hood, all I saw was rocks and loooooots of them. So I decided to keep driving to shake some of the rocks loose and in the next town, if the car was still making the noise, we would stop at a mechanic. After driving probably 15ish km and shaking out a bunch of rocks (I'm sorry if your windshield chipped as a result of me), the car was still making that noise so we stopped at a tiny mechanic where the man who helped us was an adorable, giant, blonde man. The conversation there went a bit like this:
SARAH: *between laughs*--So we were like driving on this gravel road and our car started making really scary noises and we just like really need you to tell us if the noise is really that scary or not.
Him: what kind of noise is your car making?
ME: *after looking at the others* -- well.... it's growling
Him: it's growling??
ME: yep... growling
He was looking at us like we were absolutely crazy, but then he started the car up and realized that it was actually growling. So what does he do? He puts the car on the lift and gets this tool thing out and just removes about 20 pounds of rock between the engine and engine suspension. :) So I was right about the rocks, but not about the quantity that was stuck in there.
After leaving the mechanic, we were off to Invercargill, or the deep south as I once heard it called, for the night. Once we arrived in Invercargill, we snuck onto a holiday park to use their shower facilities. That was an interesting experience. Then we were off to Queen's Park in the city center to enjoy the botanical gardens and the amazing aviary. Of course, this is where my camera would decide to die so we decided to head downtown to find an internet cafe to email our families and charge our batteries. We didn't find an internet cafe but we did find a Starbucks and thank goodness we went there. We ended up with sacks and sacks of food that was just going to be thrown out that night and the two girls working were extremely nice. They invited us to hang out the next night with them and some of their friends, so we agreed because it's not very often you get an invitation to hang out with people you just met, especially in New Zealand. After leaving Starbucks we went to get some dinner and ended up eating a whole roasted chicken and a bowl of mashed potatoes. It was sooo delicious and really hit the spot after eating canned chicken sandwiches and chips for the last 3 days.
The next day we were off to Bluff.
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