Although Queenstown was fun, nothing we’ve done in New Zealand so far would compare to our sea kayaking trip in Doubtful Sound! This is by far my highlight of the NZ trip. We paddled among the beautiful humongous fiords in the Fiorlands National Park. Please go see the photos, they are amazing! There are two places in NZ where you can access these nice fiords by land: Milford Sounds and Doubtful Sounds. They are in order, the two most popular attractions in kiwi tourism. We picked Doubtful Sounds over Milford for environmental reasons; Milford Sounds attracts approximately 5000 visitors per day. The visitors sign up for cruises, kayak trips, jet boating trips and so on and it’s a super busy place. In Doubtful Sound, the Department of Conservation allows only about 440 visitors in the fiords per day at different times and locations. This way there is fewer disturbances to the environment. We wanted to contribute to the preservation of the Park, that’s why we picked it. Besides, the fiords here are bigger and nicer. And we didn’t have to share our water with the annoying big cruisers. The water was ours alone to enjoy. We did have to pay more money for this but it is a small price to pay to preserve the NZ’s natural Parks.
It was a cold and wet morning; we were cold and miserable at first. But once we got out far enough and saw the majestic water falls cascading down the 100m cliffs, all was forgotten. We had nothing but smiles on our faces. It was a very wet time so we were treated to an awesome display of hundreds of cascades that day. Our tour guide reassured us the poor weather is actually the best time to be on the water. And was he ever right! The photos don’t quite paint an accurate picture of what I saw and how energized I felt, but I hope you’ll kind of see it. Both Gen and I were in heaven. If this was not enough to content with, we saw dolphins! There were about a dozen of them swimming from our eyesight but at one point two of them came to us, they were as close as about 20m away. This was just fantastic! From sea level, the perspective of everything surrounding us was simply priceless.
While we were paddling, our guide gave us some really neat and informative insights on the power plant they built in this region. Since this blog is already long enough, I’ll just stick to the main thing that impressed me the most: in order to preserve the environment in its natural state, they dug two tunnels of NINE km long to evacuate the water from Lake Manapouri where the turbines are all the way to the fiords where we were paddling and out to the sea. Wow eh! If you want to know more, Gen did a really good job at describing it in her blog, feel free to go have a read: http://journals.worldnomads.com/genebi Just hit the Google Translate button to English.
We left the Fiorlands the next day in quest for dry and sunny weather. No luck. A massive storm hit the southern region of the South Island and we were stuck in the middle of it. We have had rain in the last TWELVE straight days! It’s raining so hard here that at one point, the river flooded the highway and the current was so strong, it took a chunk of the pavement with it. We came to a stall on the highway along with other cars while the mechanical shovel was rerouting the water flow to drain out the highway. Once the water was detoured to the side, they proceeded to fill the gap on the road. Before we got there, a car was stuck in the gap with the water flowing right around it. Crazy eh!
We’re now in Nelson, the sunniest place in all of NZ. Well it’s kind of true, because it is still raining. The rain followed and caught up with us. But there are sunny breaks and we are not as miserable taking refuge in our van anymore. I’m glad for the one pair of jeans and lulu pants I packed. I’ve been wearing long sleeves and pants for the last 2 weeks, crazy. Today we went on a hike in the Nelson Lakes National Park, the weather was nice. In a few days, we’ll attempt to go up the Abel Tasman National Park for more hiking and maybe some beaching. Keep your fingers crossed for us J
