Oh here we go to FIORDLAND

Mega-Trip Number Two happened just one week
after the amazing trip to Mount Aspiring National Park,
so come along as I wind through another three days...

**inhale, hold, exhale; repeat**
Okay, you're ready to go!

Fri-Sun March 24th to 26th
on lakes Manapouri and Te Anau
in the Fiordlands of the South Island.



SWEET RIDE
Thomas (from K Flat) was Mr. Organization for this trip - he booked the rental vehicle, and made all of our reservations. Thanks, dude! I went with Thomas to pick up the car on Friday afternoon, and we were very pleased to lay eyes on the purple Toyota Previa that would be our sweet ride for the weekend. It was Thomas' first time driving in NZ, and would be my first as well, since I was the only other person on the insurance form as an alternative driver! We drove off towards 505 Great King to get packed and ready to go, feeling sufficiently like soccer moms!

NIGHT 1
We arrived late in the evening at Freestone Backpacker in Manapouri, our accomodation for the weekend, and checked in to our two awesome cabins (there were seven of us, and four bunks per cabin). The cabins were equipped with stoves, all the kitchen supplies we needed, a very nice table with benches, and a couch! Each of the cabins also had a quaint front porch with cushy recliners and a table, looking across over Lake Manapouri and the mountains of this area of Fiordland National Park. "It is the largest national park in New Zealand (12,500 km2), and a major part of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage site. Prevailing westerly winds blow moist air from the Tasman Sea onshore here into the mountains; the cooling of this air as it rises produces a prodigious amount of rainfall, exceeding seven metres in many parts of the park. This supports the lush temperate rain forests of the Fiordland temperate forests ecoregion" (wikipedia). Fiordland National Park is home to many amazing sights, including Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound, two of the most popular destinations in New Zealand. We opted not to go to either of these locations, however, for they must be reached by cruise boat, and that is expensive. We still knew that we would get to see some amazing flora and fauna in more accessible areas of the Fiordlands. One individual we met the first evening was the hedgehog pictured at left. Although cute and small, these hedgehogs are among New Zealand's mammalian pests, as they eat the eggs of ground-dwelling birds. This first night we ate cheese and had a little to drink, and played a rousing game of SPOONS, which Matt and I came out of tied as victors. Then we went to bed exhausted! Phew!!

DAY 1
Upon waking I was strangely giddy, and ran around singing everyone awake, first Matt and Thimo in our cabin, and then Liz, Anjali, Thomas, and Al in their cabin, just down the hill. In response to my "Good morning, good morning, how are we all this morning? Good morning, good morning to you!" I got only groans and grumbles, but at least people were ready to join me in wakefullness. I made breakfast - toast and peanut butter and jelly, and toast and beans, and cheese, of course, and plenty of tea. We spent a few hours noodling around and sitting on the front porch, before making sandwiches and getting ready to start our day with a hike on the Kepler Track.

KEPLER FOREST ROMP
The Kepler Track is a 60 kilometer track that encircles the Kepler Mountains which lie between Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau. We decided to take a short 2hr hike up to the first hut on the Kepler Track, where there is a prime area of beach on Lake Manapouri. We accessed the Track via Rainbow Reach, across a swingbridge over the Waiau River.

We once again found ourselves amongst the temperate beech rainforest of New Zealand, this one even more old-growth-feeling than those in the Matukituki Valley. I could not put aside the feeling, with the immense fern cover, that I was in some sort of prehistoric forest. The trail wound its way through the woods, and at various junctures crossed more streams. At one of these places, rather than taking the bridge, Matt and I decided that we would cross trees that had fallen over the stream, like people would have done before the bridges were there. We crossed only to find out that we were on an island, and we had to cross again on the other side of the island, still not connecting up with the path that the others who crossed the swingbridge were on...Well, we crossed back over again and, at this crossing, I got poked by a sneaky stick and slid into the water with my right leg, not noticing that I had dropped my sunglasses in the stream. We hopped off of the trees and on to the mossy ground, where we met a couple fiesty fantail birds. At first we thought we were in a nesting area of theirs, because they wouldn't stop squawking at us, but when they followed us into the woods, we knew they were just bastards. Imagine my excitement, then , when I found out I had to cross back through bird territory to rescue my glasses from the depths of the stream...Once I was on the log again in the middle of the stream, the fantails decided I was harmless enough to start swooping at me, and one bird rushed under my arm, the other nearly grazed my head! I had never been so afraid of gettting my eye poked out by a little birdy. Cheap shots, too.

Matt and I got out of bird country only to find ourselves in the thick of the untamed woods - moss-covered stumps and full trees laying across bushes and trees, and groves of ferns everywhere - where to go? This was definitely a test of our forest skills, and luck, but we found our way back tot he track, and only slightly behind Al, who tends to doddle. The rest of the walk took us deeper into the woods, past a marsh and lake, and up and down the dirt and gravel trail. A fern bird even ate one of my loogies - I din't know at the time that it was waiting for me to scare up some sandflies from the ground for it to eat, but it gladly gobbled up my phlegm, much to the dismay of certain individuals standing to either side of me.

LAKE MANAPOURI
The gorgeous Lake Manapouri was waiting for us when we reached the first hut on our journey up the Kepler Track. We spent a good hour eating lunch by the lake, skipping the slender, round stones, getting eaten alive by jerky sandflies, and engaging in our normal antics, before returning through the woods, back to our darling purple van in the Rainbow Reach car park. In the image below (from left to right, Matt, Thimo, Al, Anjali, Liz, Thomas, and I), we stand on the rocky shore of Lake Manapouri.

LAKE TE ANAU
After getting back from the Kepler Track, we decided to take advantage of the rest of the BEAUTIFUL day and rent kayaks to head out onto Lake Te Anau. They were not really kayaks, however, but more like plastic floats that you sat on top of with two pointed ends, and with about the efficiency of paddleboats - yippee! No, the important thing was that we were out on the resplendent lake, which was still as glass. Thimo, Thomas, Liz and me went kayaking, while Anjali, Matt and Al hung out onshore and in Te Anau city. We got to watch the sun set behind the mountains on our paddle back across the lake, and mostly all of our appendages went completely numb - I could not move my fingers or toes! The day was exceptionally clear and warm, but that meant that we had no clouds for insulation as our source of heat fell to the west. When we got back to the van, then, and found out that the others were nowhere to be found, we got to spent an excruciating half an hour walking around, chattering teeth and deadened nerves, until we found a heater in the television room of the hotel across the street and warmed up there, thawing. In the lower half of the image above, we walked over the rounded-rock southern shore of Lake Te Anau, on Sunday afternoon.

NIGHT 2
A warm dinner was just what we needed that Saturday night, so we went back to the cabins and gorged ourselves on some great spaghetti (compliments of chef Dan) and bread and wine, and ginger nut cookies. I ate too much and fell asleep like a lame-o, but the others stayed up and had a rousing (?) game of Wizard, a favorite game of Thimo's, which he, of course, won by a long-shot. I woke up at 2am, realized I was a loser, and read on the front porch by candlelight for a few hours, finishing Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. and it was good.

DAY 2
The second day we accessed the Kepler Track from the Lake Te Anau Control Gates, and spent some time walking around the southern shore of Lake Te Anau. We didn't have a lot of time spare, however, because we had to be at Real Journeys in Te Anau to go on our boat trip across Lake Te Anau for our guided tour of the Glowworm Caves. The boat ride across the lake was great, and we got to feel the wind rushing through our hair for a while on the top deck - a little faster than our kayaks the day before...

GLOWWORMS GALORE
Once we reached the other side of the lake, we hopped off the boat and waited around for our tour of the Glowworm Caves, actually part of the Aurora Te Ana-au Caves, in the lower area where we entered, are still quite alive, and water rushes through them, in streams, waterfalls, and whirlpools. We slowly worked our way up into the caves, on walkways through rockier parts of the cave, and on boats through larger pools of water, working our way up to the glowworm grotto, where the highest density of the worms live...! Below is a promotional photgraph from Real Journeys. My pictures from inside the cave did not turn out well!


The glowworm that we were seeing all over the ceiling of this cave were completely translucent and about the size of a matchstick. When the worms get hungry, a chemical reaction occurs in their stomach that makes them glow with a small, bluish-white light - and the hungrier the glowworm, the brighter it glows! Each worm lets down small groves of sticky string webs that dangle from the cave roof, and flying insects in the cave, who are drawn to the light, get stuck in these webs as they fly toward the light, at which point the worms move swiftly down their web, deliver a poisonous bite into the victim, and take it back to the roof for eating. The glowworms live in this larvae stage for about 9 months, after which time they pupate for one month, and then emerge as small flies. As flies, they live for only 2 to 4 days, in which time they mate, lay their eggs on the cave walls, and then, in most cases, fly into a glowworm web and get eaten up! Ahh, the circle of life, food for that from which they came! In the middle of the Glowwork Grotto I almost forgot that I was in a cave, inside a mountain, because it looked like a perfectly clear, starry night! That is a lot of hungry glowworms, and there one is below!


ON THE ROAD AGAIN
Following the wormy adventure and our boat ride back, we filled our bellies and headed back to Dunedin, dreading another week of classes. Can't we just keep adventuring? Please?? A gorgeous sunset, the best I've seen yet in NZ, followed us home, and you can see it pictured somewhere toward the beginning.

Cheers until next time, my cheeky travel companions, and those of you who managed to make it to the end of this posting!

~Danno