The Catlins region – day 2. The evening. Yang to the day’s Ying.

So we drove out to Kaka Point and on through Balcutha.  We finally found an idyllic spot just past a small little golf course – out in the middle of nowhere.  We had views of the sea from 3 directions and enjoyed a relaxing dinner of penne pasta, feta, sundried tomatoes, spinach, capers, etc.  We are relaxing and in drives a car full of young people, who proceed to drive all over the field we were parked in, doing 360’s in the wet grass.  After a while, they tired of their sport, and drove off.  A bit later, another car came along, this time pulling an empty boat trailer, and proceeded to do a similar stupid cruise through the wet meadow.  By now, it appeared that we had stumbled on the local “hooligans” party spot.  I worked on photos and Donna worked on her journal, and then we decided to button up for the night.  Donna asked if I had locked the van, and I replied, that I needed to go to the bathroom one more time and then I would lock it up.  Luckily, I had a second thought about that fairly immediately and unbeknownst to Donna, I went ahead and locked the campervan.  Shortly after, yet a third car comes driving in (it’s now dark, and we have all the “curtains” drawn in the back part of the campervan), with its brights on, spins around in the filed driving right towards us.  Soon someone knocked on our window, asking if we knew the way to Clinton.  We said we were not from the area, he laughed and said they were lost too.  He then tried to open the door.  Our hearts were in our throats.  The best case scenario is that he was just trying to scare us to death (he succeeded at this).  The worst case scenario was robbery, and potentially murder.   He took off in his car shortly after trying to get in the campervan.  After we stopped shaking, we decided to get the heck out of there, as we knew the thugs would be back to terrorize us, so we left driving down the gravel coastal road.  We pulled over once, and I sat in the drivers seat for a awhile, and thought I saw headlights – then realized it was a lighthouse, but I still felt we weren’t far enough away, so drove on a few more miles before pulling over for the night.  No cars came by the whole night, as we were in a pretty remote area. 

So after a fabulous day, a horrific night, the “Yang night” to our “Ying day”.  So even though NZ is a wonderful spectacular place, where essentially all of the Kiwi’s we met were absolutely wonderful and delightful folks – even here there are total dirtballs.  So glad I listened to Donna about locking the car – I’d rather not think about what might have happened if the doors had been unlocked.  So gold star to the quick witted wife.  It was a sad ending to an otherwise magical two days in the Catlins region – an area of NZ that we really liked.