Facing off with the edge of the world, where the gray and blustery waters of the Southern Ocean meet the rocks of Curio Bay, in the Catlins (New Zealand). Photo by Geoff Green.

Today, a post on the Smithsonian blog (sub-blog?) called “off the road” catches our attention.  The photograph on its own would be enough to catch the eye, but reading this fellow’s several paragraphs about a place called the Catlins is enough to get on the raft and start paddling to New Zealand (if, like us, you like faraway places):

A main claim to fame of the Catlins is the area’s high latitude. Slope Point is the southernmost spot of land on the South Island, at 46 degrees, 40 minutes south. Oh, come on, now. Don’t raise your eyebrows and whistle like that. Seattle, for example, boasts a latitude of 47 degrees, and Glasgow goes just under 56 degrees. Yet I’ll grant that the Catlins are farther south than Tasmania, than Cape Town and than most cities in South America. This is, indeed, among the southernmost settled areas on the planet.

It gets better:

I rode my bike to Kaka Point one afternoon to collect mussels at low tide, and in a deeper pool, as I looked for abalone, I saw the tail of a large fish nestled in a crevice. A moment later, lying on my belly, I had it pinned and spent about 60 seconds with both arms in the water, my head half submerged, skirmishing with the struggling animal to get a grip in its mouth. Finally, I emerged with a thrashing fish nearly two feet long with a head like a toad’s and vacant eyes as black as a Patagonian toothfish‘s. I flipped through my New Zealand ocean regulations booklet; the fish, near as I could deem, was a legal catch, so I dispatched it. On my way home, I stopped at Hause Made so Muggeridge could have a look. “It’s what we call ‘rock cod’,” he said—though we failed later that night through Internet searches to pinpoint the creature’s Latin name, which is what really counts in the murky seafood world of “cod,” “sea bass,” “snapper,” and so much other generic nomenclature.