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Published: September 21st 2007
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With the satisfaction that we had got to see at least part of the Queenstown festival, we left town and headed south and west toward Te Anau and the fjordlands of southern New Zealand. With snowy hills all around, the temptation was too great and it was only an hour or so before I insisted that we strike off into the backwoods near Garston to find ourselves a slope to slide down. After a half hour of gravel, snow and ice we had found nothing but fenced off farmers fields ..... “snow, snow everywhere, but not a slope to slide on” as I’m sure someone famous must have said at some point. Anyway, pressing on unperturbed we stopped at Jollies Pass in the sunshine for a spot of lunch and some fine views, before plunging into thick fog on the way to Manapouri, where according to the local we talked to, it was like that everyday. After some uninspiring views of lake Manapouri and a quick shop in town, we travelled another 20k’s or so on the ‘back road’ to Te Anau, heading off the tarseal and camping up on some rough ground alongside the Waiau river on ‘Balloon Loop’. This
is yet another Lord of the Ring’s location (of which there are loads more scattered across NZ), this particular one being used to represent the River Anduin and the Dead Marshes...woooo, scarey spiders. No photo’s I’m afraid so you can’t judge for yourselves just how scarey it was.
Having survived a night within spitting distance of the Dead Marshes, we rejoined the main road and made our way to Te Anau, checking out the DOC visitors centre and splashing out on a proper map with contour lines and everything! Believe me, if you’re like me and enjoy a good map (sad I know), there is nothing more frustrating than navigating with a collection of 30 free pamphlets with badly drawn maps and no scale. So enjoying knowing exactly where we were for once, we followed the highway toward the coast and the famous Milford Sound. The road passes through some amazing scenery, made all the more spectacular by the frost, snow and ice covering the 1,800 to 2,700m peaks either side. The icicles were awesome, with entire plants encased in clear ice, bending under the weight of the frozen water that must have built up over a period of
days or weeks.
After going through the Homer Tunnel, which provides the only way out at the end of a valley, you appear at the top of some impressive zig-zags that take you down to Milford Sound and the start of a million boat cruise options. Basically there is very little else at Milford, a DIY credit card petrol pump that with some encouragement will sell you some fuel at rather inflated prices if you were too stupid to fill up earlier (yes), a restaurant (probably expensive too), a runway/helipad for those that arrive by more exotic means than Ezyvan and the end (start?) of one of the most famous stretches of water in New Zealand, Milford Sound. This stretch of water is a fjord and is therefore linked to the sea, a fact that I learnt the hard way on an earlier adventure cycling around Norway. At a particularly low point in terms of our mental and physical will to live, I stopped with my then girlfriend (and no we didn’t stay together much longer after this trip) to make soup and try to recover somewhat. My only excuse is that already feeling rather flakey, plus the fact
that we were about 150kms from the sea, anyone could have mistaken it for freshwater and it wasn’t obvious apart from the seaweed. The resulting soup was so salty that we were both nearly sick. Oh the fun we had... Anyway I’ve gone up in the world since then and besides, Lexa was cooking this time, so we had some lovely soup and sandwiches as we watched a couple of the numerous cruises that are possible from here, head out to see the 1683m Mitre Peak and some other famous things like waterfalls. As I haven’t gone that far up in the world, we decided just to read the brochures and watch, pretending that we were being sprayed by the crystal clear waters of a 1000’ waterfall as dolphins played off the bow of our cruise ship...
We didn’t stay long in Milford and after we had finished all the leaflets, we turned tail, headed up the zig-zags and back through the Homer Tunnel. On the return journey we stopped at the amazing ‘Chasm’, a waterfall with some huge hydraulically carved rock, the scale of which is hard to capture in photo’s. As I think I say in the
caption, those aren’t sticks caught in the rocks, they’re tree trunks! The plaque by the Chasm has a nice quote by a David Henry Thoreau, “The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”
With our new supermap to guide us we donned the snow chains and turned off onto the unsealed Hollyford Road for some free entertainment. This dead end road heads north into Mount Aspiring National Park alongside the Humboldt Mountains. In fact, if you are interested it is where the Routeburn track finishes after bringing you over from the Kinloch/Paradise valley running parallel up from Queenstown where we were a few days earlier. Anyway, after a small amount of searching it provided us with a free camp spot for the night, albeit a little chilly (for reference 15 tea-lights warm up a camper van quite nicely) and gave us easy access to the Humboldt falls, our target for the next day.
The following morning we were up ’n’ at‘em bright and early, completing the easy track to a viewpoint over the falls by 10AM. They
looked great, but were still about 1km away, with a vertical drop between us and them. Fixed on the idea of getting closer, we backtracked to where the falls river ended up and set about making our way upstream to the base of the falls. Well it was an adventure alright, only one picture I’m afraid as conditions weren’t ideal for photography.... water, lots of water in fact, from above as rain as well as the river and icy rocks to boot. After battling for a couple of hours, clambering over rocks and shimmying across tree trunks (Lexa’s least favourite part) we were finally thwarted by an ever narrowing gorge and deepening river. In Summer it would have been so easy to have continued and reached the falls, but with a few hundred metres to go we had to turn back, still pleased that we had got as far as we had.
After a quick trip to the less spectacular Manau falls, we escaped from the Hollyford road and started back towards Queenstown with the heater on full in an attempt to dry things out. We had reached the most southerly point on our trip around New Zealand, maybe
of the whole trip around the world.... but who knows where we will end up in South America? Anyway, it was all north from here and with our fingers slowly thawing out from the icy river water, it didn’t seem like a bad idea to be moving back towards the equator......
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