Sights and Sounds Sunday 1/27/08

Today is another sound. Named "Doubtful" by Captain Cook because he thought if he went in with prevailing winds blowing straight down the sound, it would be doubtful that he could get back out, it was later discovered that it opened so wide once inside that there was plenty of room to maneuver a ship under sail. There are 14 "sounds" in Fiordland which in fact are really fiords (hence Fiordland) because they are created from glacial rather than river erosion. Doubtful Sound is the second largest and many times larger that Milford from the day before.

Our B&B, Te Anau Lodge, was a convent in a previous life and was taken apart and moved to this location by some previous owner. Matt and Chloe bought the place because it sounded like a good idea at the time (sounds familiar) and are so far enjoying entrepreneurship. Our breakfast is served in the chapel and Mary orders something sensible while John decides on what Matt refers to as the "Mother Superior." Our breakfast partners are a young couple from Paris, and she says that she loves visiting America and Americans because they are so uninhibited. We suspect that is a rare point of view in her country.

We are picked up by bus at 8:30, gather up some fellow travelers, and drive about a half hour south to Manipouri. Off the bus and onto a tour boat that travels across Lake Manipouri which takes another 50 minutes and we are moving pretty fast. We are seated with an English couple from Devon who tell us that they like chatting with Americans because their own countrymen are too reserved to make friends easily. The world is upside down this morning (but then again we are in the Southern Hemisphere). Now, off the boat and back onto a bus, which had been brought over here by barge, and we travel on a dirt track through woods and over a mountain pass for another hour to reach our deep water anchorage where our final tour boat is waiting.

Doubtful is much longer and wider than Milford so you don’t have the same effect of being at the bottom of a "V" but the overall feel of the place is of course astounding. We head out towards the Tasman which lies 25 miles (40km) away and we are traveling at 25mph so we will have an hour out, an hour back, and an hour of poking around on our 3-hour tour. We don’t see Gilligan, but think we spot Lovey and Thurston Howell.

More of the same. Waterfalls, spectacular rock formations, fur seals hanging on the rocks, and today we are joined by a pod of dolphins who put on a leaping show for us while we turn off our engines to enjoy their act. It was like "cue the fish!" It is another perfectly clear day and again our guides tells us that the mountains are like middle-aged people—they look a lot better with a little something wrapped around them, but we are happy with the blue skies and sunshine. Again, we can’t do it justice so won’t try.

On the way back we stop at the Manipouri power station on the Doubtful side of the lake, which is surprisingly interesting. Our bus drives straight into the mountain on the side of the lake and we descend 1.5 kilometers down below the level of the lake. The water is dropped through some specially drilled shafts and cranks seven very big generators designed to power an aluminum smelting plant in Kawai, about 50 miles south while feeding a little leftover dribble into the national grid.

Now it is a pleasantly warm afternoon for the ride back across Lake Manipouri to our bus and back to Te Anau. There are a lot of drifty eyelids after hours on the water with sunshine through the window. There is a private party going on at a college building next to our B&B and the band is cranking a little Van Morrison as we have a post-tour cocktail and update Josie, our resident black lab, on the activities of our day. We decide a little pasta will make up for the Mother Superior breakfast so John has the Bolognese (again) and Mary the smoked salmon-spinach (again) at a local Italian where all the waiters are all "prego, prego" and "molto bene" but otherwise crappy at their jobs. There is another great sunset as we walk back "home" where we grab another shared cake and glass of red wine and listen to Van Morrison. The band has obviously restarted their play list so should be done soon.

No Newspaper today