After leaving Curio Bay we drove around the headland to the next bay, Porpoise Bay. We had read that a group of rare Hector’s dolphins live here and that occasionally you can be lucky enough to see them. They are very small growing to just under one and a half metres in length and are only found off of the coast of New Zealand.
The bay itself was beautiful, and very sheltered by the rocks sticking out from the headland. The seas were looking a bit rough, but we hoped that this would provide just enough waves in the sheltered bay for the dolphins to come out to play.
We couldn’t believe our luck when we arrived at the beach to find a pod of about five dolphins surfing in the waves. They truly seemed to be playing and enjoying the surf and seemed to have an uncanny knack of picking all the really good waves.
We spent a long time watching the dolphins play and surf in the waves but eventually we decided it was time to start to make our way back. After stopping for a quick coffee in a lovely cafe near Porpoise Bay we began to retrace our route north towards the Otago Peninsula. The drive back was just as beautiful and we make a quick stop at the Florence Hill lookout to admire the waves.
Our final stop of the day was at the McLean falls walkway. We took a nice easy track through some very dense, tropical feeling jungle which included tree fuchsia and some of the native podocarp forest until we came to the McLean falls.
We didn’t know what to expect from the falls as they had received rather mixed reviews when we had been researching the area, but we were glad we stopped. The falls are around 22 metres high, which was quite surprising when we first glimpsed them through the trees. The lush jungle and moss covering rocks made the area feel very tropical and a great contrast to the caves and beaches we had seen earlier in the day.