Doubtful Sound and More

Day 8 - Manapouri is mountainous and there is a big lake here that is prime for fishing, boating and if you are brave - swimming (cold!). It is also the entrance point for tours out to Doubtful Sound. So we are here for three nights. Exploring the town takes all of an hour as it is a couple of streets with predominantly accommodation buildings of all sorts. This is a big tourist area. There are a couple of restaurants and that's it. So we head up the road to Te Anau, which is the entrance point for tours of Milford Sound, and an even bigger tourist area. More accommodation places and lots of restaurants. This is first class New Zealand wilderness. The mountains are great ski areas in the winter and the lakes and rivers and forests are great draws in the summer months. International tourists from everywhere come here by the bus load to soak up NZ's beauty. I think I'm getting visual overload. It is getting pretty hard to describe everything as the same adjectives keep coming to the forefront - stunning, awesome, beautiful, etc. - repeat, repeat, repeat. It is also my opinion that if you squashed all of the good things about Canada into a place 1/2 the size of Alberta you would create New Zealand. Glen disagrees, saying that they don't have prairies here - I say they do… they are only very small! So now we have buzzed around both towns and on our way back to Manapouri we wing off the main road and arrive shortly at a staging area for a portion of the famed "Kepler Track". This is a much traveled, rugged, 5 day hike, over hill and through dale fording rivers and scaling mountains. But since we have started mid way, it turns out to be an easy part and we have a great afternoon tromping through the forest, over a couple of swinging bridges, around a swamp, up to Lake Manapouri and back to the camper again. 8 K in not time flat! Our camp site is probably the nicest to date and we enjoy the evening cooking outdoors and chatting with our neighbor (because we are too "walked out" to walk into town - a couple of blocks - for dinner).

 

Day 9 - Our first paid tour! We get up early, pack our new backpack with food, bug spray (sand flies are ferocious here), sun screen (incase the sun decides to shine) and umbrellas (because it will most definitely rain). The boat ramp is a short jaunt through the woods from our camp site and we are away. The tour is a full day, first exploring Lake Manapouri by boat, then hoping a bus to the big power station - here we travel 2 km into the mountain, 200 m below the surface - then on to another bigger boat for the trip down Doubtful sound and out into the Tasman Sea (the body of water between NZ and Australia) and then everything in reverse to get back to the start. The scenery is gorgeous, it is windy and very cold though, but luckily the boats are all covered in. The lake is surrounded by mountains covered in an evergreen forest and the sound is banked with even bigger mountains with multitudes of waterfalls cascading down, fed by the continuous rain. This is "Fiordland" and it is truly majestic. One arm of the sound has recorded rainfall of 16 m (55 ft) in a single year, no wonder the place is covered in rainforest and waterfalls. Deer are an introduced species to NZ and particularly this area. Initially for sporting purposes, but there are no natural predators here so of course they multiplied like rabbits (rabbits were introduced here too! Duh!). So there was an open cull on the deer until somebody discovered a market in Europe for the meat, now they are captured and farmed for this. The "cowboys" that did first the hunting and then the capturing overcame the rough terrain by using helicopters and it is a long but interesting story.