First things first. Today is 10th March, and it's my brother's birthday. Therefore my thoughts are with him today; a very happy birthday to you Alan. It's an unreasonably large number, mitigated only by the fact that I reached it a few years ago. As a very young Zachary once said to me, you need a cake but you'd better make it a big one so you can fit all of the candles on.
Moving on to my trip and the update for today, I have given myself a problem. I have 95 video clips and 184 still photos to work my way through in doing today's blog and vlog, and managed to use up two Gopro batteries in the process.. I even had to delete a whole chunk of footage from previous days (having backed them up onto a mobile hard drive) to make room for it on the computer. Today has been a bit of an epic!
The alarm woke me this morning at 06:00, and I was out of the door at 06:30 for the 20km drive to Manapouri. It took me a while to get out of the car park while the ice cleared from my windscreen, but I made it to the car park and check in at 07:00 in good time for the 07:30 departure. The boat pulled away a couple of minutes early only for a couple waving boarding passes and yelling 'come back' to cause it to rebirth to allow them to board. The sun was not yet even risen as we started the 45 minute journey across Lake Manapouri.
The trip across the lake was fantastic; we left one mountain range behind us to approach a more imposing range. The scenery became more and more impressive as the sun rose behind us.
We passed between a series of islands before arriving at the jetty beside the hydro electric power station inlets, and here we transferred onto a bus for the 45 minute journey over the Willmot Pass. This is a road that was built to transport the heavy machinery into the site for the hydro electric power plant; it was easier to transport it by sea and build a road across the mountains than try to get it to Manapouri and then barge it across the lake. It's a road that isn't connected to any other roads, so any vehicles have to be barged across the lake.
A stop off at a waterfall and Doubtful Sound viewpoint for photo opportunities before making our way down to the jetty in Doubtful Sound to transfer to another boat.
A three hour cruise of Doubtful Sound then commenced. I'm pleased that I did Milford Sound first as it would have been really anti-climatic had I done them the other way around. Doubtful Sound for me was far more impressive; the mountains seemed bigger and the sound seemed narrower, which all made it seem that much more epic. It reminded me in a lot of ways of Tahiti and the Papenoo Valley but with water at the bottom of the valleys. It came as no surprise when we were told that this had been used for a location for Jurassic Park.
I explored the three decks of the boat; I started on the top deck but spent most of the trip up front, enjoying the fabulous vistas that were continually changing in front of me, and taking the full force of the wind blowing in from the Tasman Sea. We made it out into the Tasman and enjoyed riding the bigger waves; there was a school party on board and they were letting out shrieks of delight; the same shrieks of delight going off in my head but not vocalised. It was a lot of fun out there.
Then back into the sound to explore some of the arms before heading back for the jetty. As with Milford Sound, I don't think that my vocabulary is up to describing what I saw, so I'll just let the pictures do the talking:-
Back onto the coach for the return trip across Willmot Pass, and a wait for the boat to arrive to ferry us back to Manapouri. The views on the lake were once again fantastic, although a layer of cloud forewarned of a change in weather approaching.
Back to the car, and the 20km drive back to Te Anau, I arrived back at the motel at 15:00 and contemplated the sheer volume of footage I have for today. Doubtful Sound has been an absolutely epic experience. I'd been told that Doubtful Sound was better, but hadn't believed that possible after seeing Milford Sound, but I've had my eyes opened today.
I've been through the photos to enable me to do todays blog, but think I'll leave the video clips until I've had something to eat. Time for a walk into town for dinner!
In case you didn't spot it yesterday, the week 9 video is now live and can be found
here.
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