We spent the last 3 nights in Te Anu, the heart of “fiord country” in the southwest of the South Island. We definitely did the tourist thing. Drove out the road to Milford Sound (the most well-known tourist place in NZ) and did a cruise out the sound. Then the next day we did an all day trip out to Doubtful Sound, which included a boat trip across a huge lake, then a drive 2 km underground to a power station, then over the top of a pass to the west (coast) side of the mountains down to Doubtful Sound, finishing up with a cruise on the sound itself. Doubtful sound was so named by Captain Cook, because he was ‘doubtful” that he could get out of the sound if he went in because of the winds. Very understandable — the winds were howling! But I couldn’t help but stay up on top of the boat it was so beautiful. We saw more seals and on the way back we ran onto a group of bottlenose dolphins. Finally, yesterday we did a short cruise out to the Te Anu Glow Worm caves. Inside the caves you hike in a bit, then take two different boats back into the cave. They turn out the lights so you can see all the glow worms, looking like galaxies of stars. Wow. Now we have driven out of fiordland down to the southern end of the island. Staying in a lovely little cottage above the beach in Riverton. I’ll try to post more photos soon — we have lots of them so it will be difficult sorting them all out and selecting the best.
16 Feb 2005
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL