The wonders of nature.

We traversed the whole island yesterday, east to west, took about four hours with stops, on the way after stopping for coffee we came across a Taxidermist who invited us in to see his work. He has dozens of local animals on show, including this one of deer. There are a lot of domestic deer round here, we saw fields of them on the way up.
This is a very mountainous area, they call it Fiordland as this whole coast is just like Norway, fourteen large fiords puncture this west coast for many miles inland. And further inland there are many large lakes, Te Anau is the second largest in New Zealand, and is surrounded by high mountains, some snow covered all year round.

We arrived at Te Anau early enough to take a boat trip across the lake of the same name to visit caves. Across the water from the town is a very long cave with glow-worms on the roof, a spectacular sight which is impossible to photograph as it is rather dark in there, and in any case they will not allow it.
The caves themselves are full of rushing water, many small waterfalls, and have been formed by the water comparatively recently, just 12000 years ago.
We were taken across a cave lake in a small boat, completely dark apart from the mirriad tiny lights in the roof- the glow-worms. Worth a visit!

That was good, but today has certainly capped it. An early start saw us driving some 20kms to Lake Manapouri, where we boarded a boat to take us across the lake to a jetty. There are no roads across to here, but there is a road going from here to Doubtful Sound, built to service a power station and it's 15km tailrace some fifty years ago.




Doubtful Sound is a fiord sculpted by a glacier during the ice ages, it bites some 40kms into the coastline and is the second largest of the fiords, opening into the Tasman Sea.It was named by Captain Cook when he circumnavigated New Zealand in 1770, he would not enter it as he was doubtful he could get out again against the prevailing wind.
The scenery here is spectacular, as we travelled over the pass we caught our first glimpse of the Sound some 2000ft below us, and it was breathtaking. That was only the start of a day full of  wonderful views, again I shall publish some of them at the end of this script, but none of them do justice to the beauty of these surroundings.

It so happened that we had chosen a beautiful day, over 200 days a year are wet here, and when it is we understand the water falling down the mountains is  something to behold, but we still saw some great falls, and with the good weather we enjoyed unusually good clear views of the mountains too.
There are few places on earth to match this, it is a true untouched wilderness just as Cook saw it all those years ago, with wildlife just as pristine.

As we left the fiord and entered the Tasman Sea for a while we found an island with New Zealand fur seals, almost hunted to extinction in the early part of last century, but recovering nicely now. There was one very big bull just peeping over the rocks, surrounded by a couple of dozen females and their pups. We were quite close to them and they were completely unfazed.

I also managed to get a good photo of an albatross in flight, which delighted me as they really are majestic birds, effortlessly flying back and and forth across the ocean in front of the boat.

We were also fortunate to see Little Blue Penguins, not close enough to photograph as they were playing in the water. A Yellow Crested Penguin showed itself a few times also, a very rare creature, but they are very quick, we didn't have the chance to focus the camera before they disappeared under the water again. As there was a model on the boat we took a photo of that instead- cheating again!

I could show you a hundred pictures tonight, none would do justice to the scenes we have seen, so please be content with some of the better ones, and perhaps one day you can come here yourself to witness the wilderness as it should be.