Loring's New Zealand Trip blog: June 2013

Issue #10, Doubtful Sound and Manapouri Hydro Power Station

April 24--27, 2013

Fiordlands National Park. Credit: NZ Dept. of Conservation

After Dunedin, we went to Doubtful Sound, in the Fiordlands, and the Manapouri Hydroelectric Power Station, in the far southwest corner of the South Island. This part of the trip was perhaps the most extraordinary of all; but it almost didn’t happen.

Itinerary, in brief:

Wed. April 24: Dunedin on the SE coast to Manapouri: a gateway to the Fiordlands.

Thursday April 25: Manapouri to ferry across Lake Manapouri to bus over Wilmot Pass down to Doubtful Sound to ship. Spent night aboard ship.

Friday, April 26: Ship to shore to bus back over Wilmot Pass to power station; amazing private tour of the power station at end of the public tour; to ferry back across Lake Manapouri to Manapouri to get car; then drive to Te Anau for night. Amazing movie that evening.

Wed. April 24: Dunedin on the SE coast to Manapouri, a gateway to the Fiordlands on the SW coast.

In Dunedin it continued to rain. We’d planned to drive northwest from Dunedin to the heart of the New Zealand Alps, probably to the Aoraki/Mount Cook area for a day or two, before heading north back to the ferry and the North Island. This is probably the most famous of all the spectacular parts of the South Island, and was to be the highlight of our South Island trip. We cancelled. Rain was forecast for the next week (accurately, as it turned out), and we realized there was no point in going to see mountains that we wouldn’t be able to see. (Duh.) We resigned ourselves to trudging back the way we’d come, driving back SH1 all the way north to the Cook Strait ferry.

BUT: A person who interviewed Mike on the morning of our departure from Dunedin changed our minds. Like almost every Kiwi we talked to, she was eager to hear about our travel plans, and delighted to give suggestions and advice re her own special places that we should not miss. Hers was Doubtful Sound, and she argued convincingly. Here we were almost at the south end of the South Island, not all that far from Fiordlands National Park on the southwest coast--just a hop, skip and a jump over a few mountain ranges and across a couple of lakes. Sure, it would take three or four extra days, but to get Mike back to Hamilton in time for next week’s lecture, we could grab a flight for him from Queenstown (via New Zealand’s great Grab-a-seat website), and then Loring could drive the car back at her leisure. No worries, mate. Brilliant.

When we diffidently brought up the weather forecast, she pointed out that the weather in the Fiordlands was almost always rainy anyway, so that wasn’t a problem. And we were so near. We SHOULD NOT miss the Fiordlands.

So, that’s what we did. And she was right on both counts. It rained, and Doubtful Sound was extraordinary. (Here the blogger skips tactfully over our marriage’s extended discussion re whether this new idea was an opportunity not to be missed, or insane.)

Visiting Doubtful Sound is a snap. All you have to do is book the Lake Manapouri ferry, the bus over Wilmot Pass, the Doubtful Sound ship, the Wilmot pass bus and Lake Manapouri Ferry on the way back, and find places to stay for both ends of the adventure. Correct: “You can’t get there from here”. Oh, plus get Mike’s flight, sketch out Loring’s drive back north the length of the South Island, cancel Mike’s Cook Strait Ferry reservation, and change Loring’s. After an online and phone flurry of bookings, we grabbed our gear, loaded the car, and headed yet further south--priding ourselves on our new Alfred E. Newman approach to scheduling. No worries.

View from our backpacker in Manapouri.
LS improved the view, and got a gardening fix,
by volunteering to prune the shrubs around the house.

On our drive to Manapouri, the weather improved for a bit. We saw mountains! And the tops of mountains! And more than one mountain! Fascinating folks at the backpacker that evening: a French Woofer (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) plus his visiting mom, an Australian couple, and an American from California who was bicycling all around the South Island (and we thought that DRIVING on these roads in the rain was tough...).

Thursday, April 25

On board the Fiordland Navigator on Doubtful Sound.

This is our ship, and this is Doubtful Sound. But how come all the website PR photos show sun,
when it rains there 200 days a year? Photo credit: Realjourneys.

This is a more typical view of the Sound:

Photo credit: Wiki

“Fiordland National Park occupies the southwest corner of the South Island of New Zealand. It is the largest of the 14 national parks in New Zealand, with an area of 12,500 km², and a major part of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage site ... Doubtful Sound is a very large and naturally imposing fiord in Fiordland ... It is located in the same region as the smaller but more famous and accessible Milford Sound.

“Access to the sound is either by sea, or by the Wilmot Pass road from the Manapouri Power Station [which itself is accessible from the rest of NZ only by boat across Lake Manapouri. --LS] Most areas of the sound itself are only accessible by sea however, as the road network in this area of New Zealand is sparse or nonexistent, as is the human population.” --Wikipedia

"At 421 metres, Doubtful Sound is the deepest of New Zealand’s fiords. It’s a haven for nature, with resident bottlenose dolphins, fur seals and penguins." --NZ DOC
Note: 421 meters is 1,381 feet. This is DEEP. And Lake Manapouri is 1,457 feet deep. This is REALLY DEEP. "Lake Manapouri was formed by glaciers during the last Holocene. The lake is New Zealand’s second deepest lake measuring 444 metres (1,457 ft) deep. Lake Manapouri is 178 metres (584 ft) above sea level; however due to glaciers, Lake Manapouri has been cut deep into the ground and the bottom of the lake now lies 267 metres (876 ft) below sea level." --Wiki

Ferry and landing on lake: the boat to nowhere

Mountains around Lake Manapouri, from the ferry

The ferry was packed, mostly with folks bound, like us, for the overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound, plus a few day trippers.

At the head of Lake Manapouri is the power station. Land access to Doubtful Sound exists because of the power station: the road over the pass from the station to the sound was created to build the power station. More on that later. At the power station visitor center, we all transferred to the bus over Wilmot Pass. It was pouring rain (natch), and waterfalls cascaded down the steep hills along the road.

Deep Cove of Doubtful Sound, from above. Photo Credit: Wiki

“Charles John Lyttelton, 10th Viscount Cobham, Governor-General of New Zealand (from 1957–1962) wrote about this part of Fiordland:

'There are just a few areas left in the world where no human has ever set foot. That one of them should be in a country so civilized and so advanced as New Zealand may seem incredible, unless one has visited the south-west corner of the South Island. Jagged razor -backed mountains rear their heads into the sky. More than 200 days of rain a year ensure not a tree branch is left bare and brown, moss and epiphytes drape every nook. The forest is intensely green. This is big country... one day peaceful, a study in green and blue, the next melancholy and misty, with low cloud veiling the tops... an awesome place, with its granite precipices, its hanging valleys, its earthquake faults and its thundering cascades.'" --also from the Wiki article.
Clearly Viscount Cobham loved the area, and could write about it beautifully.
It is remote, and spectacular. You can hire a kayak tour, or take an overnight cruise ship.

One of many waterfalls on Lake Manapouri

We've tended to sneer at cruise ships, but this one was amazing. Relatively small, with about 80 passengers, plus a ton of crew, all of whom were knowledgable, highly competent, and friendly. Food was overwhelming, and delicious. Our dinner companions were the parents and siblings of a crew member, so we got all kinds of inside scoop re the ship, the rigorous qualifications demanded of crew members, and how much fun their son was having on the crew.

On board the ship in Doubtful Sound

Our comfy room on the ship

On the bridge.
Please note the tea cozy and the captain's cuppa tea.

The ship carries kayaks and small tour dinghies. Before supper, dodging rain showers, they got a bunch of us out on the water in kayaks. What a slick operation. They got over twenty boats, with all of us equipped with lifejackets and paddles, on the water in about twenty minutes. We paddled about in the dusk and drizzle, up little tributaries, under waterfalls, and under low-hanging shrubbery on the cliff edges. I wish we had a photo of the mother ship, with all its lights shining, and all the little kayaks homing in as dark fell. But I've lost the e-mail of the guy who was taking photos with his waterproof camera.

At the bow of the ship--close to a seal rock

Friday April 26: On board ship, then back to the power station and back to Manapouri.

We cruised through the various arms of Doubtful Sound--any one of which could fit the more famous, but smaller, Milford Sound. Waterfalls, waterfalls, waterfalls. Never seen the like. Unlike Milford Sound, which has the dubious distinction of being the wettest place in NZ, Doubtful Sound gets a mere three feet of rain per year. THREE FEET. (Montpelier's average, for rainfall plus snowfall, is 37 inches.) Some of the waterfalls cascade over 600 meters (almost 2,000 feet.) You are at sea level, and some of the peaks surrounding the sound are almost 4,600 feet high. That's right: 4,600 feet of vertical rise, right over your head.
We saw fur seals, and thanks to the squally weather, albatrosses, plus various other sea birds. (Please stay tuned for LS' NZ bird blog post.)

On the way back to Manapouri, after returning over the pass, we had a tour of:

Manapouri Hydroelectric Power Station

Display at the visitors' center

This is the power station's water intake and switchyard.
From here, huge groups of power lines head out to the South Island.

A nifty1:1600 scale model of the Manapouri Power Station,
showing the pipes (blue) which transport water from the lake to the generators,
and the vehicle tunnel (yellow) accessing the turbine hall.
Our bus drove all the way down the tunnel.
Model by Meridian Energy; photo credit: Wiki. Or maybe Meridian. Whatever.

The tunnel leading down to the power station. Photo credit: Wiki

The turbine room

We had a very informative tour of the power station, taking a bus all the way down to the turbine hall. BUT: Mike got talking to the tour guide, and the tour guide was fascinated by Mike's interests and expertise. So before the tour bus returned to the surface, the guide invited us to say down underground, go to his office, and learn lots more about the station. It was an energy geek's delight. The tour guide was thrilled, Mike and LS were fascinated. After a long visit, the guide took us back above ground to the company staff lodge, where they fed us and helped us warm up and dry out: hot tea and snacks, clothes into the dryer, rest by the space heaters on the couches in the lounge. They took us back to catch a later ferry, and we ended up back at Manapouri in the late afternoon, where we picked up our car and headed to Te Anau to spend the night, before taking Mike to his plane from Queenstown the next day.
Oh, what an adventure.

April 20-23, 2013.
South to Dunedin

Introduction:

The South Island mountains have no tops. Don’t believe those tourist promo photos you see: they actually just rise a couple hundred meters then turn gray and become sky.

Proof: To the right, our un-retouched photo of the NZ Southern Alps, taken from near Christchurch.

Compare to the postcard below:
“Christchurch at Dawn”: clearly Photoshopped? Reader, you be the judge.

Well--on to Dunedin.

It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained.

The average fall was well maintained.

And when the roads were simply bogs,

It started raining cats and dogs.

After a drought of half an hour,

We had a most delightful shower.

And then, most curious thing of all,

A gentle rain began to fall.

Next day was also fairly dry,

Save for a deluge from the sky,

Which wetted us right to the skin;

And after that--the rain set in.

--Anonymous.

[Transcribed by Ed Harrow from a hut on one of NZ’s Great Walks; and entered in Ann Richards’ and and John Coolidge’s Three-Point Camp log.]

Sun. 21 April we continued south on SH1: Cheviot, Greta Valley, Waipara, Glasnevin, Amberley, Leithfield, Waikuku, Woodend, Kaiapoi, Christchurch (stopped), Rakaia, Ashburton, Temuka, Washdyke, Timaru (stopped); Oamaru. Coast and fields and hills and the usual endless pastures of cows, or sheep.

Christchurch was very sad. They appear not to have recovered much in the long term from the devastating 2010/2011 earthquakes, and that is indeed what many Kiwis told us. Apparently the immediate crisis response was impressively well-organized and effective, during the state of emergency. This is the Kiwi style of sucking it up, rolling up the sleeves and just getting the job done. But now the ravaged city is languishing. Beyond the impact on lives lost, on individuals, on families and on the city’s social fabric, the earthquakes have had a staggering impact on New Zealand’s economy, which the entire country will be dealing with for decades to come.

To our tourists’ eyes, little is now happening. Much of the heart of downtown is still cordoned off and unusable. There are still thousands of condemned or damaged buildings elsewhere in the city as well, which have not been either torn down and replaced, or repaired. There also was very little traffic and activity overall--and this in the middle of a weekday work day.

Some political liberals blame the lack of progress on the conservative government currently in power, which we were told decided not to tax citizens overall for Christchurch recovery but to leave it all to the insurance companies and the private sector. Or perhaps the task of restoring and rebuilding the second-biggest city in New Zealand, which formerly had a population of 363,200, is an overwhelming job for a country with a population of just over four million. For whatever reason, over two years after the second and more devastating earthquake (since which there have been hundreds of aftershocks), there is no atmosphere of bustle, hope and rebuilding, but an atmosphere of melancholy. We’ll hope that there is more going on than we observed, and that our impressions were skewed by a dark and rainy day.

We spent a lot of time in Christchurch's beautiful Botanical Garden.

Fantastic bed of ground covers

Mike by yet another fantastic tree, also in the Gardens

Even in the fall, there were masses of roses still blooming. And the "Pinetum", with exotic conifers from all over the world, was very impressive. Here also, cordoned-off and condemned buildings.

LS enjoying the Botanic Gardens (yep, still raining)

Timaru: We stopped here to give the drivers a break; it is a charming town with a lovely public park near the sea. And the rain had slowed to a mere drizzle.

Part of the park at Timaru

Oamaru: This town has some beautifully preserved stone buildings in a handsome Victorian old town which we toured in the pouring--really pouring-- rain. We scurried into The Last Post restaurant (triple pun--more on that later, maybe), where we huddled at the table nearest the fire and gently warmed and steamed during a delicious dinner.

Here’s how Mike phrased the current trip to a colleague at the Uni:

“Thank you for your note. I am afraid we are a bit damp.

Moderate rain as we drove to Wellington last Wednesday.

Serious rain as we walked around Wellington, saw Te Papa and took the ferry to Picton last Thursday.

More rain as we gave up on Abel Tasman and toured Blenheim and Renwick last Friday.

Serious rain on Saturday as we drove from Blenheim to Cheviot with a stop to look at seal pups.

And something close to a downpour as we went through Christchurch and down to Oamaru today.

And rain predicted for tomorrow as we drive to Dunedin.

On the basis of our personal experience, there is nothing higher than 600 meters to be seen in all of South Island.”

Mon. 22 April: Oamaru to Dunedin. We made it to Dunedin! SH1 AGAIN south to Dunedin at last. Royally hosted at the University of Otago’s Executive Residence, since Mike was a visiting scholar. By sheer chance, we learned of a Benjamin Britten concert, we went, the music was beautifully sung and played.

Cathedral where we heard the Britten

Dunedin Town Hall--what we saw when we left the cathedral after the Britten concert.

Tues. 23 April: Dunedin. Mike spoke to the University of Otago's Faculty of Law; we touristed about Dunedin admiring handsome old stone buildings during the light rain.

Univ. of Otago Campus. NOT the Law School.

This, alas, is the Law School. But hey, it has a great view of the handsome parts of the campus.

Statue of Justice on the city's Law Court

LS took a bird-watching boat tour out the harbor past Otago Peninsula to sea. Albatrosses! More albatrosses! [Albatri?] Cold and wet at sea, but seeing the nesting colony of albatross youngsters, and the parents landing and feeding them, then taking off and sailing and floating across the waves, with their nine-foot wing spans, was extraordinary. Very lucky with the weather (truly!), because the worse the weather the more likely you will see the albatross.

Dunedin has an extraordinarily beautiful train station. Here's the exterior, and some views of the interior.