New Zealand Vacation

Tuesday, January 30:
Doubtful Sound

This is a quiet land. There are no morning birds.

Today we do one of the major excursions of the vacation: the trip to Doubtful Sound. The morning dawned cold and gray, but the fog lifted into wispy clouds about 50' up over lake and mountainous shore as boat departed. We cruised the length of the lake to the base of the Wilmot Pass over the Southern Alps. This is in the very heart of the Fiordlands, and the jumping-off place for some of the most beautiful walking tracks in the world. We were to do it the easy way, however, and boarded a bus over the pass.

The bus is specially built with extra-low gearing. It needs it to negotiate the steep switchbacks and goat trails that pass for a road over Wilmot Pass. It is driven by one Ian Clearwater who delivers commentary on our surroundings with exaggerated irony and gratuitous circumlocution worthy of Howard Cosell. This area bears the brunt of moisture-laden Westerlies, and everything from the vertical cliff faces to the weathered and twisted beeches are covered in moss several inches thick.

Down the seaward side of the pass we coasted in low-low gear to board a boat on Doubtful Sound. Words like “serene” and “majestic” spring to mind on the Sound, but don’t do it justice. The landscape brings textbook explanations of glacial action to life. The Sound walls are steep, covered in greenery, and plunge directly into the water with no trace of a beach. We could best appreciate it at one point when the captain shut down the engines, and the silence grew very loud about us. We skirted a tiny island with an abandoned sealing station about the size and décor of an outhouse, with a hand painted sign that read “Hilton Hotel: vacancies”. We approached a rocky island at the mouth of the Sound covered with seals lounging around. We raced a pod of dolphins that gleefully leapt and cavorted around the boat. (A couple of our housemates at Possum Lodge did the trip the following day, except they did the Doubtful Sound leg by kayak. They reported wonderful interactions with the dolphins.)

Part of the trip was a tour of a most remarkable electrical power generating station. The level of Lake Manapouri is several hundred feet above sea level, and receives bountiful amounts of water from rivers, snowmelt, and rainfall. In the ‘60’s a plan was hatched to use the lake’s water to generate electricity. An enormous cavern was blasted into the mountain a hundred feet below the lake. Electrical generators were installed in the cavern, and a tunnel 8 miles long was blasted under Wilmot Pass to exhaust the spent water into Doubtful Sound. The bus took us down a long spiral tunnel to the generator room. The place was pretty impressive.