May | 2017 | Life on the Left Coast

In the tourist brochures of Fiordland, that mountainous part of New Zealand in the far south, pictures of the Sounds, both the very popular Milford Sound, and the somewhat less accessible Doubtful Sound, show the magnificent scenery of these mountainous fiords glistening under the blue sky sunshine in all its glory. Stunning. The problem is, the pictures are just a wee bit bogus.

That part of the world sees as much as 9 meters of rain every year. On average only one of five days will see sunshine of any kind on the fiords, and five consecutive days without rainfall is considered drought. Now the boat tour operators say that the scene in the fiords is spectacular no matter what the weather – as a matter of fact if it is raining the temporary waterfalls stretching along the mountain cliffs are a wonderous sight. And that’s true. No one would be disappointed. But on our trip to Doubtful Sound, our view was different from those cloudy, foggy mystical days. Out of sheer blind luck, our visit was brochure-perfect.

Milford Sound is the more easily accessible of the two. 30,000 tourists a year trundle up the road to Milford – from my cottage perch on the hill just outside Te Anau, the town central to Fiordland, I watched tour bus after tour bus passing along the distant road. The scenery along that road is spectacular and once you reach the Sound you will find a large boat terminal where hoards of tourists, many on group tours centered on nationalities – Japanese, Malaysian, Chinese – or mixed groups on a (long) day bus trip down from Queenstown, line up to board the many boats of different tour operators to cruise the Sound.

Doubtful Sound is different. Just getting to it is a bit of an adventure. You board a boat which takes you on a 45 minute trip across Lake Manapouri. Once on the other side, you disembark and board a bus for the half hour ride down a very steep, switchback road leading down to the head of the Sound. There you board another boat for the cruise down Doubtful Sound.

Captain Cook and his buddy stood on the deck of his ship peering at the entrance to the fiord from the Tasman Sea, trying to see what was beyond the rocks and islands at the mouth of what he thought was a harbour. Buddy said “Suppose we do go in there, do you think we’ll be able to maneuver our way out again, against the prevailing winds? Do you reckon there’s enough room in there?”

“Doubtful” replied Captain Cook.

We sailed out to the mouth of the fiord to check out the view that Captain Cook saw all those years ago. Rocky islands covered with sunbathing seals are scattered across the entrance and dolphins appeared to say hello and hang out with us for awhile. Seas were calm on this beautiful day but I’m mindful that this is not the usual sight. Most of the time the tour boats cannot venture out that far.

The steep winding road that the bus cautiously traveled to get us down there was not built for tourists. It was the 1960’s and New Zealand was building a big aluminum smelter down at the tip of South Island. They needed power, and lots of it. So some genius came up with the idea of building a hydroelectric plant at the lake at the top of Doubtful Sound. The only problem with this particular plan was it would require flooding Lake Manapouri to raise it by 30 meters, thus altering for all time the geography and ecology of this pristine environment.

“Oh no you don’t!” and there started the beginning of the environmental protest movement in New Zealand. After marches and protests and petitions signed by over 10% of the population, the project as it was originally conceived was canned and the engineers went back to the drawing board. Result, the plant was built 30 meters down into the earth and the lake remained untouched. Everything to build the plant and now, to maintain it, was brought by ship to the head of Doubtful Sound and dragged up the steep, switchback road to the top. Not surprisingly, the project went wildly over budget and was completed 3 years late.

No one lives at Doubtful Sound. A Princess of Maori legend put a curse on the Sound and brought sand flies to the area – little biters that would ultimately drive away anyone who tried to live there. And it has worked.

At one point on our cruise, we sailed into an offshoot of the Sound where the guide announced that we were going to have the opportunity to inhale the quiet of this place where people don’t live. The captain was going to cut the engines, we were to stop talking and just listen to silence for 5 minutes. Right. Good luck with that – getting people to stop talking. Of course there was one Frenchman who just kept yakking away but eventually he was shut down and indeed, we were able to just listen to the sounds of silence, in a beautiful place surrounded by huge cliffs and mountains and deep deep blue sea. A magical day.

The Maori named it Patea – the Place of Silence.

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Takahe

Speaking of birds, they had a lot to do with our second trip to New Zealand last December.

When we left New Zealand after our first trip in January 2015, we said that we’d like to go back someday. There were no particular plans of when or even if that would happen – after all, there is a very short wishlist of other places to go. I’m less inclined to travel far that often these days, so there has to be a pretty big draw to get me going.

That draw happened last summer when BBC aired a 3-part documentary on the geography and wildlife of New Zealand, with its very dramatic and stunning cinematography, narrated by the dulcet tones of native son Sam Neill. Wild New Zealand showed images of remote landscapes of mountains, fiords and waterfalls, and forests of tree ferns and other huge trees dripping with moss. Flightless birds thought to be extinct, the takahe, were re-discovered not all that long ago, deep in these landscapes and are now being protected. By the end of the series, I was in and went off to book a return visit.

We headed for Fiordland, the far southern part of New Zealand, to see these lands of waterways carved by glaciers over successive ice ages where mountains rise vertically from the water surface and stretch below the surface another 500 meters deep. This is land of water, of thousands of waterfalls tumbling down the cliff faces, fuelled by the rain. Our own temperate rainforest “Wet Coast” on the west coast of Vancouver Island, for example, gets 3 meters of rainfall a year. Pikers. In 2016 the coast of Fiordland saw 9 meters of rain.

Up close and personal with a waterfall. Standing on the stern of the boat, as it moved in close to the Milford Sound waterfall, I got totally soaked taking pictures. I’d take a shot, turn my back to wipe the lens, then swing round again to take another. There were only a few other sopping wet nutcases out on deck – everyone else was watching the show high and dry from inside. Later, I remembered that while my camera body is weather resistant, the lens I was using was not. Oh.

Human history is a relatively short one in New Zealand. First settled by the Maori from Polynesia around 1280 and later by Europeans in the 1800’s, these first settlers would find many unique birds in this faraway land including many that had lost their ability to fly. There were no mammals other than bats and sea animals, hence all these happy flightless birds waddled around with no predators in sight. That of course was to change with the human predators and introduced animals. Many natives bird species vanished, many still face extinction or are at risk and New Zealand conservationists have been seriously addressing the issue of the introduced predators – the rats, possums and stoats, using poison and traps to clear areas adjacent to the national park trails and in some cases, clearing entire islands, allowing the re-introduction through breeding programs and monitoring of birds at risk. New Zealand has a stated goal to remove these introduced predators by 2050.

Trying to redress the balance – one trap at a time.

In Fiordland we stayed just outside Te Anau, the town hub of the region, in a cottage on a hill with mountain views. Our landlord appeared surprised that we were staying for 5 days – apparently this is unusual as people tend to stay only a night or two at most on their way to somewhere else. The main draw here is a cruise on the Milford Sound, one of the epic fiords, but there is much more to experience if you just stay put and explore. My “rule” of staying in one place for a minimum of 3 nights serves me well. It was in Te Anau that I was able to get up close to the rare, previously “extinct” takahe birds and others at the Bird Sanctuary on the shores of Lake Te Anau, taking their portraits at feeding time.

Te Anau is also a start and end point of 3 of New Zealand’s Great Walks up through the forests and mountains of Fiordland National Park.

A big draw in this and other regions of New Zealand is hiking, not surprising, given this scenery. They call it “tramping” in New Zealandese. The sight of “trampers”, bent over with huge backpacks and dangling smelly shoes, is a common one. It is not exactly wild hiking, for the most part as the trails are well maintained and if you are not too fussed at listening to a bunch of snoring travellers, you can stay in one of the many staffed “huts” along the way. Or set up your own tent at these camp sites. Still, the rapidly changing climate can bring cold, wind and rain at any time of the year, and would make for a challenging multi-day hike through killer views and scenery. There are 500 km of trails and 60 huts and access is controlled by the necessity to make reservations if you do care to do one of these epic 3-5 day hikes – and reservations are taken months in advance.

I hiked the Kepler Track.