There's gold in them thar hills...

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Diana ‘struck gold’ with her on the spot decision to turn right rather than left out of the campsite and to head further into the Otago goldfields before heading south into Southland (!) … if only navigating in Auckland was as easy.
The journey to Arrowtown was short but very beautiful, through a valley reminiscent of Glencoe in the sunshine! We were immediately taken with this quiet, little community which obviously serves as a refuge from the frantic activity of Wanaka and Queenstown. The clapboard buildings of this goldrush town were well-maintained, and although gentrified by beautiful gardens and attractive street furniture, you could still imagine what this place would have been like as a frontier town. The assay scales in the NZ Bank window, the town gaol, the shanty cottages of the miners and the ramshackle huts of the Chinese community (made mainly from ‘Newport, S Wales’ steel! – long way from home!) all gave a sense of timelessness to the place, despite the upmarket shops and eating places.

We paid our $3 and grabbed our trowels and gold-pans and headed down to the second-richest gold river in the world! The water was beautiful, as were the multi-coloured rocks and gold dust literally covering every surface but the work was hard … bending over in baking sun, knee-deep in freezing, glacial water, sifting the flakes (?) from the grit and the stones. Well, that was what E, D and P engaged in and Diana did indeed find a good flake only to see it blow from her fingers into the river at the moment of revealing it to her fellow careful prospectors. Meanwhile, ‘Dredger Bill’, across the river, spent a tenth of the time looking and splashed more than he sifted and still turned up the best find of the day! A quick lunch in the sun and we were off driving again.

As the crow (or Tui) flies we only had 70km to cover from Queenstown to Milford Sound (our next site of activity), but such is the ruggedness of Fjordland that we had to cover almost 400km in a huge U-shaped detour via Te Anau to get there. Lakes flashing turquoise in the hot sun, improbably steep U-shaped gorges and valleys and every mountain dwarfing anything the UK has to offer, even the Kiwi’s version of Ben Nevis … no wonder this place is a World Heritage Site. Unbelievably, our run of good luck continued and the weather forecast had a hot, dry and cloudless day booked in for Friday. We decided to try and miss the crowds and the ‘traffic jams’ (Rough Guide) on the way to Milford Sound by driving in early and catching the first boat trip out to where the mouth meets the Tasman Sea. 8.45am off the quay meant we needed to leave the campsite in Te Anua by 6.30am … an early night, clothes laid out (not easy in the Spaceship ©) and no breakfast meant we made the ETD but soon realised that we had insufficient fuel in the tank for the 240 km (without any petrol stations) to cover today … aaagh!
Eventually, P managed to find a 24-hr pump and we headed north through the most glorious alpine scenery. Ice-caves in the summer, beautiful mirror-smooth lakes and a Tolkienesque descent through a hand-carved tunnel under a mountain later, and we found ourselves standing on the dock waiting for our boat…Actually – that’s a lie! Only a madman (or a Scotsman!) would stand outside in the barrage of sandflies that hit us in the car-park. The spraying we had on boarding the boat certainly helped and our 90-minute cruise up the sound was bereft of insects, but rich in other wildlife … fur seals basking and playing on the rocks and bottlenose dolphins surging through the bow-wave from the boat. The sound was really too magnificent to really take in; we really only got a sense of the heights of the sides when W, E and P took a pummelling by standing at the bow under two spectacular waterfalls. The day continued hot so we stopped for a quick explore of a swing-bridge and a tumbling mountain river on the way back before spending the afternoon relaxing with Maths club and some hairy go-karting around Lake Te Anau!

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Comments

[Kate & Giles]

Petrol
Please publish a tally of how many of us ran short of fuel at Milford Sound - know the Childs did too!! Sounds like you are still having far too much fun, Kate x