The Alex & The Eleanor + 1

Thruday January 10, 2008
Queenstown to Doubtful Sound
Sunny and hot

For our last trip, we drive about 2 hours to Manipouri, a small town at the edge of Lake Manipouri and Fjordland. Yes, finally we are in prime LOTR country, and its quite pretty on our drive, in a endless pasture with lots of mountains kind of way. Its probably one of the easiest drives we have done – flat and straight. At Manipouri we board one boat that takes us across the lake, (it’s a very big lake, that takes over an hour) at which point we get to the a giant hydro electric power station that provides 14% of the power for NZ, and hear inspirational tales of the nascent environmental movement in NZ saving the lake from being raised to increase the power output. And then we get on a bus and go over a pass that was built at great cost to service said power station and finally we get to Doubtful Sound. Which is really a fjord. (a true one, they keep insisting – is this a problem, large inlets claiming, falsely, to be fjords? Could you start a legal practice soley dedicated to prosecuting false fjords?). We get on a much bigger boat, one that will be our home for the night, and head out.

The area here gets up to 6m of rain a year, but that seems quite distant as the clear sunny weather continues, though the wind can get a bit brisk as we motor around. We wander through the sound for a while, having all the cool features and flora and fauna pointed us. A pod of bottlenose dolphins that live in the sounds join us for a while, and play in the bow, leaping up. Very cool. We anchor for a bit, and people have the option of taking a launch out for a nature talk, or sea kayaking (which we do) or swimming (which we also do). As we are kayaking around the dolphins return and surface right in front of Alex and I. Very very cool. Then we get to swim, which I thought would be much colder then it was. Still brisk, but there is this weird thing where the top 2m of the water more fresh water, all the run off from the mountains and rivers, and then beneath that is the sea water. So the top little bit is pretty warm, if you can stay in that and not stir it up to much.

Sadly we can’t swim for too long as we are heading out to the mouth of the Sound where there is a seal colony. Also a penguin colony, but sadly they are off eating so we don’t get to see them. The seals are pretty cool though, though the waters are much rougher as we are pretty much in the Tasman Sea at this point. We are only there for a bit though, and then we head back into the sound to anchor for the night. We have dinner - a buffet, which is fine but nothing of note (though they have Pavlova for dessert! Yeah!). I want to try to look at the stars, figuring you really can’t get any darker then this, but by 11pm or so, its still too light to see much of anything. Crazy far south are we. Being quite tired (sun and wind will do that to ya,) we head to bed. I wake up in the middle of the night and decide I might as well try to see some stars, so I bundle up and head out. Even with the lights on the boats its quite impressive. I think I may have even seen the Southern Cross, but I am not entirely sure.