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Published: June 30th 2008
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Te Anau is the main town in the Fiordlands to base yourself to visit the Sounds on day trips. We spent our first day in Te Anau itself booking a couple of trips, once that was out of thw ay we waited for the rain to ease a little before heading out on a bit of a walk. We ended up walking a couple of hours along the Keppler Track, which is one of the great walks in New Zealand and is apparently quite famous. It takes about 4 days to walk the whole thing...
Next morning we were up early to be picked up for our day trip to Milford Sound. We had decided that the best way to see the sound was from a kayak, so had booked onto a small group trip to spend the day kayaking around and generally avoiding the big tour groups. It turned out to be a brilliant decision as we had the best day! When our guide picked us up she let us know that it had snowed over night and we might be in for an interesting journey and some interesting weather for the day. As it turned out we didn't
see any snow on the way there, and the weather was pure sunshine and clear blue skies.
The drive to Milford is a well known drive, along the Milford road which rises up to about 700m in the mountains. On the way we stopped off for a little walk around the Mirror Lakes, small perfectly still and clear lakes that give you amazing reflections of the surrounding scenery. They were very pretty. From here we continued on to Milford, and to the base for the kayaking company. We were kitted out in extremely attractive thermal clothing for our trip, which actually turned out to be amazingly warm and comfortable, then we were taken to our kayaks and pushed out to the Sound. We then spent the next four hours or so just slowly making our way around the Sound, visiting sights like the Sutherland Falls, stopping for stunning views of Mitre Peak, and looking for fur seals (and finding several) along the rocks at the sides of the sound.
After about 2 hours our guide decided it was time for a lunch stop....in the middle of the sound! We just lined three kayaks up, secured them with our
paddles, and bobbed about whilst eating sandwiches and drinking hot drinks...one of the more scenic lunch places we've been!
Afterwards we began the paddle back to base, seemingly followed by one of the seals that seemed to like having his photo taken.
Once we were almost back, our guide asked if anyone would like to try jumping into the glacial water! Rich and the other two lads in our group decided on giving it a go, a decision they regretted about 10 seconds later! It was icy cold and they rushed straight into the tent to stand in front of the jet heater afterwards...brrrrr
The next day we awoke to snow in Te Anau....very exciting! We headed off to meet our trip to Doubtful Sound, leaving from a small town called Manapouri about 15 mins down the road. On the way there the snow seemed to get thicker...leaving us wondering if our trip would even be running. It was, and it was great. We started with a trip across Lake Manapouri itself, the only way to access Doubtful Sound. The lake is huge, and it took nearly 90 minutes to get to the other side! There were
times when the snow was so heavy we couldn't actually see anything, apparently it's quite rare to actually get snow at that level so we felt quite lucky, if a little cold, to be seeing it like few others have. Once we got to the other side of the lake we met our coach driver rex, who was driving us through the mountains to the sound itself. After about 10 minutes of driving we had to stop while rex fitted snow chains to the bus the snow was that thick. The scenery looked amazing as it was all under about 2 feet of snow, very pretty!
We ploughed on through the near blizzard until we descended down the other side of the mountain pass, and reached the harbour where our boat was waiting to take us on a cruise across the sound. The sounds looked really eery as it was coverded in mist and snow, completely different to our day at Milford the day before.
The boat was fantastic, and had lots of open air decks (as well as indoors ones) so you could get great views all around. We'd only been travelling along the sound for ten
minutes when the captain stopped the boat as he had seen a pod of bottlenose dolphins up ahead. These dolphins are apparently the biggest in the world which is why they can withstand the cold water in the sound. The dolphins came right up to the boat which was great, and did a bit of showing of for everyone on deck watching.
We carried on out toward the Tasman sea, as the mist began to clear, we got to see lots more waterfalls and mountains along side the sound itself. And a few seals too. We went right along the sound, almost as far as the open sea, however the weather was pretty bad, and apparently there were massive seas out in the Tasman, so we couldn't go any further than "shelter rocks" which we were pleased to hear, the waves were crashing right over the rocks we could see further out. We were happy when the captain turned the boat around! Sailing back in to the start of the sound was great, at one point they stop the boat engines so there is no noise at all, and you can appreciate how isolated the sound is. Unlike Milford
A dip in the sound
Rich cools off after a day of kayaking action Sound, there is only one boat on Doubtful in winter, and we didn't hear a single sightseeing aeroplane or helicopter.
After three hours on the boat, we went back on the coach the way we had come earlier in the day. We stopped briefly at an underground power station, where hydro power is created from the lake. Not sure why they include this on the Doubtful Sound tour! Still, we did get to drive down a winding tunnel to 2km underground, that was quite good fun. Then it was a trip back across Lake Manapouri, with weather just as bad as it was on the way out! Exhausted from our day we headed off to the campsite for much needed sleep before heading off to Queenstown....
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