Te Anau

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One thing you notice about New Zealand roads, especially when driving yourself, is how windy they are. The fact that our quality hire car made the noise of a distressed sheep if you took a left turn too quickly made us even more aware of this fact. Another feature of the roads are the numerous one way bridges that go over gorges and creeks, and it's not until you're right on top of the bridges that you know whether it's your right of way or not. Not that that's really a problem though, as there are 10 times more sheep here than New Zealanders, and therefore no cars on the road. Painted signs on the roads are done Yoda style. Imagine you're driving up this page and the signs are as below:


Bridge

Way

One


The last thing that I'd like to mention, whilst I'm at it, is the ridiculous rule that if you're turning right into a side road, you have right of way over oncoming traffic turning left!

Anyway, back to our road trip. We decided to stop at a place called Nugget point, not that dissimilar to Cape Byron in Australia. There was a lighthouse and some pretty impressive rocks off the shore, but it was really windy and cold. We did see some seals/sea lions (they were really far away, so we weren't sure) and some yellow eyed penguins.

Next on the agenda was a stop off at slope point, the most southerly point of the Kiwi mainland. The path to Slope Point is on private property, and the Lonely Planet guide advised us to ask permission if anyone was about, but the place was deserted. It was still something like 4000 miles to the south pole though, and 5000 miles to the equator, that information being the highlight of the walk.

After hitting the road again for a couple of hours, we arrived at Invercargill, which we pretty much just busted through, or would have done if Dan and Will could have agreed on which way to go. Still, we got to drive past KFC 3 times, which was nice, seeing as we were all starving by this point. Another 3 or so hours drive saw us reach Te Anau, where we would stay the night before heading to Milford Sound in the morning.

Te Anau is situated on the east coast of Lake Te Anau, which looked pretty good in the dark, but we couldn't stop in daylight as we were pushed for time already. The first YHA of the trip was our accommodation of choice, and it was really different to any of the hostels we've been in before, much less social and full of older people and families. We ventured out for some cheap beers and another leg of our pool competition, but the place was pretty dead, one of the bar staff confirming our thoughts that we had come at the wrong time of the year, still, the beer was cheap.

After what I'd call a semi lie in, we filled up with petrol, found out that what the YHA receptionist had told us about needing snow chains was rubbish, and headed for Milford, with what looked like blue skies breaking through. We decided to skip all of the attractions on the way as Dan and I had already found out that you couldn't trust Australasian travel time estimates (twelve apostles) and if we had time, we'd see stuff on the way back.

It took a couple of hours to drive to Milford, climbing up the mountain ranges, over some impressive waterfalls and creeks, and then back down again through a really long, one way tunnel through a mountain.

Sadly the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and the mountains were covered in mist. We took a ferry cruise around Milford Sound, which we were informed was actually a fiord, because it was formed by glaciers. It is basically a fresh water stretch of water between two mountains, that meets with the sea. Fresh water running off the mountain tops (lots of it) runs into the Sound, and remains on the top as it is less dense than salt water. This creates low light levels at much shallower depths than normal, and so you get a very different variety of marine life here, such as different types of corals. There is as underwater observatory that you can go in to have a look at the coral, but it had started to rain, and we decided not to bother with the observatory. The cruise back to the shore went past some magnificent waterfalls coming off the mountains, and a lone sea lion, which was rare for this time of the year.

As the weather was not great for us, I would say that the drive to Milford was just as good as the cruise itself, but I can see how on a day with better weather, the cruise would give you awesome views.

The Chasm and the Mirror lake that we stopped at on the way back were also not as impressive as if we had stopped on the way there, but a great day nevertheless.

We needed to make it back to Queenstown the same night, so after a what seemed to be a never ending journey, we checked into a backpackers recommended by our mate from Fiji, Alan, called Bungi. We decided to have a night out after the mission of a journey too, which in hindsight wasn't the greatest idea ever, as we had a 5+ hour drive back to Franz Josef the next morning to retry the glacier walk.

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