Te Anau Wednesday 30th December

I did my usual on Tuesday, getting up early in Queenstown and driving to Te Anau to catch theNature Bus/Boat trip to Milford Sound which left at 10:30. I must say I enjoyed it a lot-both the drive along Milford Road (Quite an engineering feat given how avalanche prone the road was and is, and the hardness of the granite. There is one long tunnel which is single lane only and is really crude with a rough surface and must surely have been built without the huge boring machines they have today.) - and the threemasted schooner trip on the Sound itself. The weather was pretty bad-cold and windy with low cloud and squally showers, but that added to the atmosphere of the Sound (part of the region called Fiordland). Good packed lunch on board too. Saw seals, and dolphins which are a particular pleasure to watch.

This is an incredibly wet part of the country (and world) with rainfall averaging 9m per year; the maximum recorded is 14.6m!

The driver of the coach was interesting with her commentary, particularly concerning animals and plants in New Zealand. The country only has one indigenous mammal - a small bat (the reason lies in the fact that NZ was the first country to break away from the then southern continent and hence native species hadn't developed.) Most of what has been imported is therefore causing problems:
-Stoats brought in to kill imported rabbits are now decimating some bird populations; you see signs along the marked trails showing where traps are set;
-Conifers grow so fast in NZ that they are adversely affecting many plant species;
- 'Scottish broom' as they call it, brought in for hedgerows, is a big pest; as are lupins which are everywhere (they were introduced to bring some colour to Southland;
-Possums came from Oz and have expanded hugely in numbers; actually you see many dead in the middle of the road (I didn't know what they were at first).

Good trip. I was exhausted by the time I got back and had something to eat. But the Te Anau YHA is a joy-small and intimate and...I had a twin bedded room with en suite facilities!!

This morning I left at 8am. I had no food but a bacon and egg sandwich and coffeee at a little quirky shop 5mins from the YHA was just the job. Te Anau is another tiny little place, growing up as a base for the Milford Track and other tramps. It was cold and showery last night in Te Anau and this continued all the way to Dunedin where the temperature at 5pm was 6C only.

Misc blogettes about the journey to Dunedin:
1. Stopped about halfway in a slightly bigger town called Gore for coffee. Outside of the cities, it is the only place apart from Rotorua with parking meters (incidentally to this point I had only encountered about a handful of traffic lights outside the cities too, mainly on one-way bridges).
2. Saw a shop in Gore named : La Hood's-The Chemists'. Some people I know will appreciate this!
3. Coming out of Gore there was a sign: 'Gore-Clinton 44km Presidential Highway'; and entering Clinton was the sign "Clinton - 'Our Three Horse Town'!" Nice sense of humour in these parts!

Staying in a hotel in Dunedin called the Leviathan. Fits exactly the Rough Guide's description: 'The most atmospheric hotel in Dunedin and the best value...built in 1884.' Interpretation: shabby and old-fashioned, but everything works and it has atmosphere for sure!

This afternoon I went on a bus tour of the city. Dunedin has some grand buildings built on models from Scotland mainly (and elsewhere in the UK too. And it's built on hills so the streets rise sharply from the sea, but it seems a bit of a hotch potch to me. It doesn't have the modern buildings of Auckland or Wellington. There is a Scottish feel for sure, and not only in the place names. Looking forward to seeing the penguins & albatrosses in their natural habitats.