Te Anau is the largest town around one of the most popular tourist areas in all of NZ. The 14 Fjords on the southwest coast of the Tasman Sea are named Sounds, which they readily admit are misnomers but they are not about to open a can of worms by renaming them now. The two most popular are Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound. We have hit them both in the last two days. First up yesterday, Jan. 24 here, was Doubtful Sound. It was Alex’s day off and since we are staying on a farm about 5 kilometers from town, one of the owners, Win, was our designated driver for a drop off to the tour provider. Win is a 5th generation NZ farmer who started the B&B on the Dusky Ridges farm about 6 years ago. She runs the hospitality end and her husband Henrik runs the farm. She is a marvel, we will spend our 3rd and final night here tonight, she has provided a fresh loaf of bread every day and homemade baked goods as well as provisioning the fridge with all the breakfast makings one could need and Bonnie just left for a walk about the paddocks with Henrik to view the animals. No wonder they are always number 1 or close on TripAdvisor.
But anyway back to the Sounds. So the way you get to Doubtful Sound, a 40 kilometer long Fjord, is to take a bus from Real Journeys Tours (monopoly provider of these tours) building in Te Anau, you get off at a place called Pearl Harbour (where there are no pearls or oysters) a port on a river that runs into Lake Manapouri. You get on a large boat custom designed for Real Journeys with about 200 new friends and sail across the lake for about 45 minutes to the location of a huge hydroelectric generation plant, West Arm. There you disembark the boat and jump on another bus for a ride over the Wilmot Pass. This is a road carved out of the mountainous rainforest in the 1960s to facilitate construction of the electricity generation plant. The road took two years to build and estimated that it cost about $8 a centimeter to build. It connects Lake Manapouri with Doubtful Sound. Good to leave the driving to professionals on this gravel road, as the sides were steep and the road was winding and about a 20 degree slope. Oh and it was pouring rain. Rainforest….rain…can’t tell you how many times we have heard that it rains about 200 days a year here. Good news, it starting raining when we got on the bus and it stopped when we got off, which was great because we had to stand in queue for a bit as our next transport unloaded the prior tour. We boarded an almost identical custom built boat for our 3 hour tour. The weather started getting rough…not really just wanted a Gilligan’s Island reference…it did start to rain and the wind picked up, but we were off exploring the Fjord at 24 knots per hour. The scenery was fantastic and the visibility was quite good. We were able to get outside during the trip and take some photos and the rain let up as the day progressed. Waterfalls were sprouting everywhere since this land is not designed to hold water. No real topsoil, just mosses and lichens. Tree avalanches are a thing here. Anyway besides waterfalls, the highlight of the trip was the baby NZ fur seals at the Tasman Sea mouth of the Fjord. Some of the photos…..
Today, Joel’s Birthday, we got Alex back for a 7:45 start for the drive to Milford Sound. A smaller, yet more popular Fjord about an hour and a half drive from Te Anau. By starting early we hoped to beat the bus traffic from Queenstown. The rain started early on the drive and did not let up all day until we crossed back to the Eastern side of the mountains in the afternoon. It’s a shame that the Milford Sound boat ride suffered from poor visibility as what we could see was more dramatic than Doubtful Sound and would have been more photogenic. Here is an example of what we faced.
Highlight was encountering some Kea’s, an endangered NZ parrot, in a car park right after a 1.5 km tunnel through the mountain. They love to hang around car parks and peck at the rubber on cars. They also like to eat people food which makes them fat. Fun with parrots.
After the trip, back to the Dusky Ridges, birthday drinks with Win & Henrik, a birthday dinner in town tonight and then on to Queenstown tomorrow.