Light my fire

Wednesday, 22/08/2012 - 68 A.D. 

Ooooooh, chilly this morning – people in the campsite had to de-ice their cars. We were fine because when it’s this cold Tim reaches over and sticks the fan heater on for a while and we only get up once it’s nice `n` toasty. But that only works when we can plug the fan heater in.

Te Anau, where we awoke, is at the start of Fiordland, New Zealand’s largest national park. It’s so big that it occupies near enough the whole south west corner of the south island. And even though it’s that big, there is only one road running through it – the severely isolated, yet stunningly beautiful highway 94. There are no gas stations along it and journey's end is the only settlement of any size in the whole of Fiordland – Milford Sound. If you want to get anywhere off highway 94 then you either walk, fly or take a boat. This place takes no prisoners. Oh yeah, this was gonna be good!

This part of the island is one of the wettest places on Earth. Ten inches a day is not uncommon, and rain tends to fall on 200 out of the 365 days in a year. The guidebook said that the rain can help bring out a real moody magnificence to the peaks, but we were blessed with bright sunshine and clear blue skies. Straight from the off we could tell that this place was special and there’d be lots of cracking pictures to be had. Obviously my camera wouldn’t be up to the job, but Tim was hoping to get some shots good enough to enter the annual Fiordland Photo Competition.

We had loads of little stop-offs on the way, but the first of any note was Mirror Lakes. You can probably work out that the name of the game in this place was reflection, and not the emotional, introspective sort. Unfortunately at this point we synchronised with two coach loads of Japanese tourists. Now don’t get me wrong, I really like the Japanese, but when you get a large group of them together they don’t half make a racket! Kind of destroyed the ambience of the place, but at least I was able to get the following piccy to demonstrate how still and clear the waters were:

We managed to get away before the coaches and soon burnt them off. Accelerating down the road we looked at our petrol gauge and saw we had just under half a tank. The guidebook suggested one should judge if one has enough fuel for the 240 kilometre round trip before setting out. “Round trip”…so does that mean there isn’t a gas station at Milford Sound? Nah, there must be…it would be crazy if there wasn’t. Then again, what if…ooooh, look! Shiny thing!

A section of highway 94 is a tunnel through Mount Something-or-other, but the kind of tunnel with a deep incline that is so dark you need not just your headlights, but full beam when going through it. But before we entered the dark place, we touched snow for the first time on the trip! Well, it was more like rock hard ice, but at least it was white and cold.

When we arrived at Milford Sound, we were a bit surprised to see that it’s little more than a ferry terminal with a nearby air strip. Seems that most people come here to see Fiordland from above or as part of a cruise. There was the one café that doubled as a corner shop, some public toilets and a couple of car parks and that really was about it. Good job the scenery looked so spectacular then! Oh and there were a couple of self-service gas pumps to avoid any need for the brown trousers on the journey back. 

The above mountain is Mitre Peak (the smaller one in front of it is The Footstool) and it dominates the view across from Milford Sound. The harbour was being redeveloped to allow more manoeuvring room for the vessels of the competing ferry companies, so at least you can’t hear the industrial dredging machinery in the photographs. There were a couple of walks we could do, the first being to a lookout post past the gravesite of Donald Sutherland and his wife Elizabeth. Donald did not star in Don’t look now, rather he was a Victorian sealer who decided that if he would ever lay anchor it would be at Milford Sound. And he did, marrying a widow from Dunedin and running a guest house for the walkers who came to tramp the various trails that the Maoris had trodden across deepest Fiordland. Without Don and Liz, there might not be a Milford Sound…though it ain’t exactly a metropolis now, and that’s all for the good.

The cheeky chap pictured above was an extremely friendly duck-type bird that took a shine to us and followed us out of the reeds and into the bush. At first we thought it was a kiwi, but then remembered Colin’s wise words from Camp Elsdon on Porirua – “They’re nocturnal, dumb-ass!” On our way back through the bush, we met a friendly couple staring up into a tree. Apparently they’d spotted a rare bird between two branches, but when we looked closely it turned out to be nothing more than a big, fat wood pigeon! I was tempted to invite them to set up a hide in my parents’ back garden and see as many as they liked.

After 1,001 photographs, Milfs-Are-Sound had little left to offer us, so we hit the road south, going back along highway 94 to distant civilisation. There were plenty of DOC campsites along the way and we’d decided to stop off at one, given that freedom camping seemed especially frowned upon in Fiordland. However, we still had a few hours until sunset so we stopped to do a bit of a marked tramp across the hills towards whatever lake it is that Queenstown sits on. I should point out that this is hardcore hiking stuff and these are the types of tramps that last several days. We’d only be doing about an hour and a half.

After about 30 minutes of this…

…we reached a bit of this…

…before eventually arriving at this…

This was Howden Hut, a collection of rickety buildings in the middle of nowhere that are unstaffed from May to October. It’s basically the type of place you go to on scout camp – rough arse kitchen facilities downstairs and enough wooden bunks upstairs to sleep a troop of unruly adolescents. And a hut for firewood sits across the stream. I know I’m often going on about how deserted the campsites seem, but this place had a real ghost town feel to it!

 We easily made it back along the trail before dusk and found ourselves a nice little lonely DOC spot known as Cascade Creek. As you can see from the picture below, it came equipped with a rudimentary fire surround-type thing which Tim immediately went to inspect.

Light was fading so we gathered logs, kindling and dry grass. Then we rooted round in The Chariot for any tourist maps and magazines that we no longer needed. 

Despite our best efforts (and a lot of blowing from Our Kid), we couldn’t really get the fire going. The big logs were just too damp for the flames to take hold and we had to go into the van when our hands got too cold. Damn this winter camping!

But 30 minutes later we’d had our meaty soups, filled our hot water bottles and poured our glasses of wine before settling down to write the daily blog. All was well again. Gotta love this winter camping!