New Zealand - Fiordland - Te Anau and Doubtful Sound - Words Fail

So this week I decided to take a mini-break and give Mike and Ashley the chance to miss the joy, laughter and humility I bring into their lives with my presence here. I headed out for a quick three day excursion to Fiordland, in the SouthWest region of New Zealand to check out the slightly less famous and way less touristed Doubtful Sound (the more famous and incredibly touristed one being UNESCO World Heritage Site, Milford Sound). Doubtful Sound is ten times as big as Milford and probably ten times as remote, hence has ten times fewer tourists. This was not a cheap excursion, but I sensed it was one I would regret not doing so I ignored my cheap miser instincts and forked over the cash for the day cruise.

In order to get there, I first bussed from Dunedin to Te Anau, the gateway town to Fiordland National Park. About four hours drive across the prettiest farm pastures and rolling hills you ever saw with a liberal sprinkling of sheep here and there. And then in the last half hour of the drive, these looming mountains (the foothills of the Fiords) appear out of nowhere. Very cool.

Te Anau itself I found pretty vanilla. It had lots of hostels and shops and info booths, so it was a useful place. And it was on a big lakeshore, but not a particularly remarkable lake in my experience. Very quiet place too - full of trampers and campers, so the whole town is in bed by 9:30pm (even on St. Patrick's Day!) and up and off to the trails at 6am. Quietest big hostel I've stayed at so far, that's for sure.



I was disappointed to awaken to dreary plentiful rain in the morning. The weather in Fiordland is notoriously wet, fickle and often unpleasant. The day before had been a stunningly sunny day, so I was bummed I'd missed out on the Sound's one decent weather day this week. Turned out not to matter, since the weather on the Sound blows in from the Tasman Sea and changes every few hours regardless. All four seasons in one day indeed. And it turns out that regardless of the weather, the curse of Fiordland perseveres - the evil sandflies. They literally swarm any open skin when you are not on water. Unrelenting and far worse than the mosquitos of northern Ontario, the sandfly is my new most hated insect.

After being picked up from my hostel, I was driven to the nearby town of Manapouri, on Lake Manapouri, a far more impressive and generally gorgeous lake to the south. In order to get to Doubtful Sound, we had to ferry across the lake to the Manapouri Underground Power Station, to transfer to a bus to drive forty minutes along the length of Wilmot Pass Road to the wharf at Doubtful Sound, where we would take a 3-4 hour cruise out through the Sound to the Tasman Sea and back again.



On the way there, we also were given the chance to tour the power station, which produces 15% of NZ's power and 85% of which is used entirely by an aluminum smelting facility in Bluff. They hollowed out a 2 km tunnel leading into the station, which looked a bit like a James Bond villain's lair. I didn't find the station itself that interesting but the tunnel was fascinating. It took two years to build and because the rock around here is all quartz and granite, i.e. super hard, they had to blast it out the entire way! The rubble was used to pave the Wilmot Pass Road.

The Sound itself is not actually a Sound (drowned river valley taken over by the sea once the glacier retreats), but rather a Fiord (land carved by glacier, filled in by sea). But English didn't have the word Fiord when Doubtful was discovered so they call it a Sound. Doubtful's water comes from three places. First, the Tasman Sea. That's a no-brainer. Second, when the 5-9m of monthly rainfall lands here, the temperate rainforest filters it to the ground and then the hundreds of streams of waterfalls carry the rainwater back into the Sound's basin.



Third, the power station diverts the water from Lake Manapouri that churns its turbines to generate electricity through the mountain into a manmade river that empties into Deep Cove, the harbour for Doubtful Sound. That's a whole lot of water.





And true to form, the weather was rainy when we embarked, misty as we neared the Tasman Sea and then cleared up into a lovely sunny afternoon. As for describing Doubtful Sound, I could try to tell you about the steep fiord cliffs, the buffeting winds, the landslides from the earthquakes, the waterfalls, the mollymawks, the sea lion colony, the wild dolphin pod and the utter remoteness of this place. But they have to be seen to be believed.