Bluff

Another shot of the camper. This was at a nice "rest area" or kind of lookout on the scenic route to Invercargill. The lookout was out on a meandering river (at right in the image, beyond the trees, so just slightly obscured). It was a pleasant enough place to have lunch.  The road was not very busy and so the place was pretty quiet.  Except for the occasional lamb bleeting.  As (bad) luck would have it, however, we weren't alone at this picnic site for long...just a few minutes later another campervan full of what sounded like French rolled up.  Of course they came out with their Gauloises, or whatever brand they were smoking...stinking up the place (I used to be one of these stinkers—I'm glad I'm not anymore, especially since we used to smoke inside vehicles, I bet the campervan would have stunk if we had kept that up).

Speaking of the campervan (I got up this Thanksgiving morning, fairly lazily, and my mind drifted back to waking up in the campervan, I guess I kind of miss it a bit :) here is what the interior looked like. I have to admit that its creature comforts were quite good.  Behind the driver's seat was the dining table which doubled as a bed although we never set that one up.  Instead, we ended up sleeping above the cab.  You can't quite see it in the pic, but there was a mattress up there and a ladder that would let us crawl up there.  It was a bit squishy, but manageable.  The back of the van had another bed (in all there were three, as this was a 6-berth van) that we mainly used as a sofa.  We slept there the first night but the fridge noise was a bit too loud.  The fridge is under the stove, to the left of the sink.  The tall white door you see is the toilet/shower.  All of this equipment is very similar to a large sailboat, and most of the onboard systems are the same, e.g., electrical, including panel on which you had to turn the water pump on/off, water, with usable and waste water holding tanks, gas, and diesel.  I can't now remember whether the sailboat we were on was the same but I think so—I'm pretty sure it too had a diesel engine and propane for cooking.  The procedure on both, if I remember correctly, was to keep the water pump off unless you were actually using the water as it tends to drain the house battery and pressurizes the water lines.  Everything else could be on, and had to be on, to provide load when the truck was plugged in (to "shore power" as we'd called it on the boat).  The van also had an inverter somewhere which provided alternating current for regular household appliances (like hairdryers or what have you; for me it was iPhone charger, which served as the morning alarm clock).

Later on that day we reached Invercargill, although we actually circumnavigated it, as it were.  Here we are arriving at the "end of the world", well, at least the paved or road-accessible world.  We are at the top of a pedestrian-accessible lookout just south of Invercargill, at a town called Bluff.  From here we could see the town as well as Stewart Island, which I think is the southernmost piece of land before Antarctica.  Behind us was some kind of industrial harbour where we could see large tankers getting loaded.  There may have been an aluminum smelter or something back there, I don't quite recall what the nature of the industry was.  At the end of the road was this signpost on which you can find distances to other destinations, e.g., London (18,958 km), New York (15,008 km), Sydney (2,000 km), etc.