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With my website all caught up, I left Invercargill around 9 a.m. on an overcast morning and headed north to Te Anau (pronounced "Tay ANN-ow," population 2,000), a bustling summer resort town and the activity hub of Fiordland, a beautiful area of southwestern New Zealand with lots of, well, fiords. A fiord (spelled "fjord" in other parts of the world) is a glaciated valley that's been submerged by the sea. There are lots of fiordish things to do in this area during the summer months, such as fiord cruises and fiord aerial sightseeing.
You can also go hiking, or "tramping" as they call it in New Zealand, on two of the most famous trails in the country, if not the world: the Milford and Routeburn tracks. This idea appealed to me because I love backpacking. I've gone on overnight backpacking trips in the U.S. since I was seven years old and spent several years working as a wilderness ranger and firefighter in the Colorado Rockies when I was in my 20s. So the idea of doing some serious backpacking in New Zealand intrigued me.
But then I did some research and learned that, while these two trails are supposed to be spectacular, they're also immensely popular. In fact, you need to make reservations months in advance just to hike on them – and even then, your itinerary is strictly regimented. You can't even camp on these trails, as I learned. Instead, you have to stay in communal huts and can spend only one night in each hut, no matter how bad the weather is. "Move along, move along," seems to be the mantra.
These kinds of Disneyland regulations are essential, I'm sure, given the popularity of the trails. However, they don't appeal to me. In addition, the idea of sharing a hut with 25 people whom I don't know, some of whom are drying their wet socks and underwear above my head as I lie in my sleeping bag, doesn't really float my boat. Staying in New Zealand's tramping huts, according to the guidebooks, is a good way to meet people. But I usually go backpacking to get AWAY from people.
Hiking, therefore, was out of the picture for this solitary recluse. And I'm too cheap to go aerial sightseeing. But I really wanted to do the fiord cruises, since I'd heard a lot of good things about them, so cruise I did. I spent three days in Te Anau and took a cruise on Doubtful Sound one day and a cruise on Milford Sound the next. They were two very different cruises and I'm glad I did each.
Doubtful Sound was named in 1770 by Captain James Cook during his exploration of New Zealand, on the first of his three voyages through the Pacific. I mentioned before that Cook, an irrepressible, fearless and admirable British navigator, was the first European to explore New Zealand, 130 years after the islands were "discovered" by the Dutchman, Abel Tasman. Maoris had been living in New Zealand since about 1200 A.D., then Tasman bumped into the islands in 1642 and named them after the Zeeland province of the Netherlands. Tasman didn't explore much of New Zealand, though, leaving that honor to Captain Cook over a century later. As Cook approached the narrow sound on his ship, the H.M.S. Discovery, he decided not to enter it because the prevailing wind direction made him doubtful that, once inside the sound, he would be able to leave.
Doubtful Sound today is still difficult to get to – in fact, I had to take an all-day trip to get out to it. First, our group rode a boat across a lake for an hour, then we hopped on a bus and rode down to the sound, where we boarded another boat to cruise through the sound. After a spectacular three-hour cruise on Doubtful Sound, we repeated the whole procedure in reverse to get back to Te Anau. It sounds complicated but it was definitely worth it.
The best part of the Doubtful Sound cruise was when the captain nudged the boat right up to the edge of a precipitous cliff that plunged straight down into the water. He cut the boat's engines and asked everyone to be quiet. For the next three minutes, everyone stood still and we enjoyed what the captain called “The Sound of Silence,” hearing – not Simon and Garfunkel – but only the seagulls crying and the water dripping off the cliffs from three hundred feet above.
The only bad thing about the cruise on Doubtful Sound was the group of a dozen or so retired Americans who came along. Some of them were nice but the a few were your typical and much-dreaded "Ugly Americans" – very loud, rude, whining, and obnoxious.
The 50ish woman whom I had the misfortune to sit next to on the bus ride back got agitated about a single sandfly that was flying around inside the bus. With a sadistic smile, she took out a can of insect repellent and proceeded to empty the entire contents of the can inside the hermetically-sealed bus. I don’t know if the sandfly bit the dust, but several tourists on the bus nearly did and you could hear the coughing and wheezing all the way to Invercargill. That group of Americans was something else, and being the only other American on board, I felt like putting a sign around my neck saying, "I'm not with them."
Other than that, it was a terrific cruise and I had a great time. We didn't see any other boats during our cruise on Doubtful Sound and the experience was quite memorable. So if you ever get a chance to see it, don’t be doubtful like Captain Cook. Go for it.
Above left: On the beautiful drive from Invercargill to Te Anau in southwestern New Zealand. Above right: Sunset on Lake Te Anau, the second-largest lake in New Zealand.
Above left: I spent a few days in Te Anau. While I was there, I took a day-long cruise to Doubtful Sound. Actually it's a four-part trip all crammed into eight hours, with Part One being a boat ride across Manapouri Lake. Above center: Cruising across beautiful Manapouri Lake in the morning. Above right: Part Two is a bus ride down to Doubtful Sound. The sound is on the Tasman Sea, which separates New Zealand from Australia.
Above left: Part Three is a cruise on Doubtful Sound. Captain Cook named this sound in the 1770s because, due to the winds, he was doubtful that he could sail back out of it, so he never entered. Above center: Majestic fog-draped cliffs above Doubtful Sound. Above right: At the end of Doubtful Sound, there's a seal colony on some rocks in the Tasman Sea. Next stop, Australia.
Above left: The skipper during our "three-hour cruise" – just like on Gilligan's Island. But where's Ginger? Above center: Part Four of our trip was a visit to the hydroelectric plant that links Lake Manapouri with Doubtful Sound. Above right: This is a diagram of the hydroelectric plant, with Lake Manapouri on the left. Our bus took us down in a tunnel (the yellow line) hundreds of feet below the surface. I enjoyed the tunnel ride almost as much as the cruise on the sound.
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