Doubtful Sound 24/25 Jan

Half an hour down the road from Te Anau we arrived at Pearl Harbour to start our journey across the magnificent lake Manapouri by boat.

6 days into NZ and We’re All out of superlatives so let’s just say our jaws were on the floor as soon as we set sail, 😮😮😮

It was soooo beautiful. The rain meant the view was different than it would have been with a blue sky background, but we appreciated the fact that this place lives and breaths on rain and took huge pleasure in what we were able to see. Excuse the reflections, as all HAD to be taken inside 🙏🏼

Almost an hour later we arrived at our next stop near West Arm power station – no really😳

The next leg we travelled by coach across Wilmots pass which was constructed as an access road during the construction of the power station in the late 60’s.

22km journey through rain forest terrain with a running commentary about the

Fiordland National Park-No J

It is, not surprisingly THE Wettest part of NZ about 7-8 mtrs a year, in the last year they’ve had 12 mtrs.

It Covers an area

Approx Same size as Wales

The Rain Forest dates back 65m years to Jurassic times.

Moss on sides of roads is up to 12” thick/deep in places, it thrives on the damp but is also the food to the vegetation.

The moss grows on everything in the forest.

14 Fiords in the Park in total but only Doubtful and Milford are ‘easily’ accessible.

They’re called Sounds but technically they’re fiords.

Sounds are created by rivers flowing through, fiords by glaciers.

On top of the peak we stopped at Spey valley to see the river running WAY beneath us.

We joined the Beautiful ‘Fiordland Navigator’ (no J in NZ) at Deep Cove, the head of Doubtful Sound, and we were welcomed aboard by the captain, Vaughn, who also introduced us to the multi tasking crew. All young, very enthusiastic kids, about 12 of them in total.

Looking after 70 of us.

Soon after that, our agenda was explained and we were allocated our accommodation. A relief as we’d been ‘carrying’ our bags for more than 2 hours by this time.

So we got the key to a Fabulous cabin with a ‘ sea view’🤣🤣

Back up on deck Nic gave a brilliant commentary about everything we were passing with geology/biology/and other ology lessons all along the way.

Here’s a few pics of what we saw

One announcement said that we were exactly half way down the 42km fiord, looking ahead we were seeing ‘secretary island’

Looking back we could see Wilmots pass, the road we’d come down to meet the boat.

Sue was struggling to keep her hat on in the wind and take the pics. when she passed the bridge, Vaughn invited her in to take the forward view. She stayed a while and talked about his time in Earls Court, the difference between Milford & Doubtful sounds, Vaughn showed her on the ‘charts’ what else we’d do n see on our trip

A while later, we had our recreation time in Blanket Bay where we could Kayak, Swim, go for a pootle around in a tender or just sit and relax. We were torn but opted for the tender.

Gabby, who’d been our barmaid earlier was now our tender pilot, with John from Vermont observing, as it was his first trip, lovely boy 😜

Gabby from Seattle was better as a barmaid than a tender driver / imparter of area info, but it was fun, nonetheless.

We’d made a few connections with 2 separate Dutch couples, so when it came to our 6pm soup? We all ended up sharing a table, also for supper later. Great company, typically Dutch.

After the playtime we headed further on to Shelter Islands on the edge of the Tasman Sea.

On the largest of the Islands we were entertained by a pretty large colony of seals, the 3 wk old pups were really cute, waddling around the rocks – if you zoom in on the video you should see them moving

&
src=”https://aroundtheworldin80stays.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/img_4058.jpg” class=”size-full wp-image-1555″ height=”3024″ width=”4032″> From there we went out into the HUGE Tasman Sea – next stop Heading West would’ve been Tierra del Fuego, S America !!!!!

Luckily we didn’t go that far, just a quick foray to ‘say that we’d been there’

Turning around we head

towards ‘First Arm’ where we’re anchored overnight.

A superb buffet supper was laid out for us all to enjoy.

More time with the Dutchy’s exchanging life stories, before Nic gave another Eco talk in the forward salon.

Sue gave this a miss in favour of an early night, as it’s anchors away at 06.15.

Gav went along though and now knows what life was like here before humans came along 😒 in brief, it was man that brought the predators, possums, rats and stoats who did their best to kill off the indigenous BirdLife. However 84 unique indigenous birds survived. Compared to the UK where, allegedly, we only have 1 unique indigenous bird!!!!!!

Apparently the possums were brought here deliberately to create a fur trade, where there was none.

Maoris brought the Rats and stoats. fascinating stuff. 😳

Sue retired to our cabin on Malaspina deck – named after a Spanish explorer from way back when.

Above us is the main salon where she heard the crew, obviously sweeping up ready for breakfast, bless ‘em.

The bedding was amongst the finest we’ve had all trip, Sheridan Sue Summizes?

And the pillows get a No 1 rating 😴😴😴

Thursday 25th January .

Anchor Chain ‘wake up call’ at 6.30 and the day was underway. Still dark and considerably duller than yesterday it was quite hard to get moving, but the smell of Bacon above had the desired effect. It was raining hard so we thanked our lucky stars for yesterday’s dry weather.

Sue ventured out to take in a few unmissable sights and stops

The tallest peak in the sound

Other amazing sights

The sails up
A waterfall
yesterday

Nic collecting drinking water.

It Looks brown because of the tannins but it’s pure as pure, apparently it’s what we’ve been drinking since we boarded ( the filtrated version to take out the tannins to make it look more acceptable )

We stopped in Hall Arm, for the sound of silence – Vaughan radioed that he was turning the engines off and appealed /ordered silence for 5 mins or so, not even any cameras to spoil the tranquility. 🤫🤫🤫

A Very ethereal and thought provoking experience. The clouds swirling around the rocks that almost seemed to move in the silence, the odd bird noise but JUST nothing, was A MAZ ING.

After the silence we were allowed to take pics 😜

He then reminded us that they wanted to

‘bring back the birdsong’

We’d learned yesterday that ? island in the middle of Lake Manapouri is now pest free, new birds have been introduced, and are successfully breeding. The hope is that they will be able to spread to the rest of Fiordland when it’s pest free by its target of 2020.

The whole of NZs target date is 2050.

It’s evident that Conservation of their natural environment is paramount to these guys.

Our mate Capt J Cook wrote in his journal about the cacophony of birdsong on entering Doubtful sound, this is what they’re wanting back by 2020 in the National Park.

The scale of mountains in D S is the dominant factor, but what we see is only a part, some 400mtrs more are below the surface.

We left the boat in Deep Cove and joined the bus back to West Arm. Mark drove us back across Lake Manapouri where we got our first glimpse of blue sky & the Sun today.

Docking back at the Real

Journeys Wharf, we wished a fond farewell to our crew who’d travelled back with us as it was the end of their week long shift and the start of their week’s ‘shore leave’ an alternating crew replacing them.

Also ‘Tot Zines’ to our Dutch shipmates, they’re also spending 6 weeks here in similar places to us so we may come across them again

We haven’t dedicated a separate blog post to an individual place/trip. But this one definitely didn’t need to be tagged into the end of the previous 6 days activities.

A very special experience ❤️❤️