Alright, on to another instalment of the South Island Road Trip! I hope you don’t mind all the details, but I like to include them so I can look back and remember too.
We spend the night in Queenstown at another backpackers place and this time we didn’t get a room to our selves. We checked in and the other girls noticed that someone had their bag on one of the beds but wasn’t actually in the room. They thought it looked like a masculine type bag and we discussed the possibility of it being a man and how weird it would be to sleep in the same room as a strange man. We were a little nervous but went down to bring up more of our things. When we got back the owner of the bag was back and it turned out to me a woman and we were all secretly relieved. She had short grey hair and looked to be in her early forties. She was a backpacker for real, unlike us who had each brought 3 large suitcases on our trip and were traveling by car. She would walk or take a bus and had been doing so for several weeks as she was checking out the south island. She was a very interesting woman and I found later on that she was spiritual as well. I got into a conversation with her and it turns out that she was interested in mediation and made time for it every morning before she woke up. She wasn’t a christian, but I told her that I too spent quiet time in the mornings asking God for guidance and that I relied on the Bible for the peace in my life. She found it interesting to hear what I had to say and we kind of compared a few of our experiences with each other. We wished her well the next morning and both went our own ways.
Next we traveled to the little town of Te Anau, where we dropped off our things at another backpackers which was much more like a camp ground and had much better facilities. It was very comfortable and had separate little cabins for groups of 4 with really flash bathrooms and showers a short walk away. The last place was really sketchy, with co-ed bathrooms. Tanya was surprised when she went to use the toilet that there was a man in his underwear brushing his teach. We guessed by their accent that these people were from Europe. We found on our trip that there were a lot of Europeans and Germans in particular, that were traveling in New Zealand. They seemed to be a lot more open about things like privacy. Anyway, like I said, the new place was really nice. We dropped off our stuff and then carried on to Milford.
Milford was a dead end and we had to come back this way after we saw it. This day was by far my favourite day of the whole trip. It was the most fun, the most beautiful and the most interesting. I wish I could show you how beautiful this part of the world was… We drove through the huge mountains and even through a long tunnel, through forests and winding roads for about 3 hours until we reached the fjord, which was an inlet from the sea. Milford Sound it was called, even though it was actually a fjord. Anyway, we had a quick bite to eat and then got on a boat and road out through the sound to the ocean. The most famous peak in Milford sound is called Mitre Peak and is in some of the photos below. There are tramping tracks that let you hike to the top of it and around the general area and someday I’d love to come back and do that. When we reached the ocean the waves started getting really big which made the boat jump up and down. Adrienne and I started this game out on the front deck where we would wait for a wave and then jump as big as we could when the front of the boat reached the top of it. We would feel like we were flung into the air and got that funny feeling in our stomachs like you get when your drive fast over a hill. We did this again and again and just kept laughing each time. The other passengers came out and watched us from the upper deck and found it quite amusing to just hear our fun. We were so tired and wet by the end, but I’ll never forget it. Then the boat turned around and came back as the sun set. It was very cloudy, so the pictures were not as good as they could have been but still lovely. We also got to experience glacial water from a waterfall rain down on us. It rains 200 days a hear in the Fjordlands and when it does the water pours out from every crevasse. We drove back to Te Anau and spent the night warm in our beds.
This was really the turning point for out trip. Every day after this we were just very tired and we sort of wished we hadn’t planned so much. But, we kept on going according to our plans and still found it enjoyable. We were now starting the 8th day for our trip. It was Friday and we needed to make it to Invercargill. It was about 4 hours drive and we had only a few things we wanted to see. We ended up doing a walking track but got tired after 30 minutes and turned around. Then we made a quick stop at a little limestone gave we found advertised on a brochure and walked through it. I’d like to come back and check it out again. I think it’s one of those little gems of a place that most people don’t know about. Then we stopped at gemstone beach which is a beach littered with rocks that are green and blue and yellow. I took a few home. It was raining and real really windy. Then we finally arrived at our destination and stayed the night with a family that had a 11 year old son and a baby boy. Lovely people. They fed us and everything. Their house used to be a school and they were fixing it up. It was pretty neat to see.
The next day we went to church in Invercargill and came back to the house for lunch. The family had plans to go camping that weekend, so they said goodbye and then left us to sleep one more night in their house. Saturday afternoon we drove out to a place called bluff, which has a sign that points in all directions to all sorts of destinations It was very cool. Then on the way home we stopped at the Queens Gardens which were really lovely. Before we had found the garden we had given Invercargill a pretty low rating because it was so flat and boring. Compared to the rest of the South Island it was pretty blah. But, it’s not all that bad. It’s the southern most city in the world and is truly at the bottom of the world.
The rest of our trip was the journey back north up towards home. I’ll leave that for one more instalment of the South Island Road Trip posts. I hope to post a compilation of the videos we took along the way as well.
[…] South Island Road Trip Part 3 […]
[…] South Island Road Trip Part 1 South Island Road Trip Part 3 […]