Doubtful Sound

If you have managed to find us on the map you will see that we are staying at the Southern tip of Lake Te Anau on the eastern side of Fiordland. Fiordland is unspoilt, uninhabited and in many places inaccessible. As far as tourism goes we were told today that 'what goes into fiordland comes out' and that includes people, boats and rubbish!

Fiordland is yet another World Heritage Site and it is magnificent. The vegetation is rainforest and densely covers most of the steep sided fiords. The sides are sheer rock and the trees inter-twine their roots to cling to the rock face, teamwork at its best ......occasionally the snow and rain will be so heavy that a tree avalanche into the fiord occurs leaving the rock face exposed.

Doubtful Sound is huge and not accessible by road - this was our first organised day trip and it was good fun - bus, boat, bus and boat - we went with a very small company who donate a percentage of the profits to fiordland conservation.

It was a grey, wet day - no doubt about it and when we looked back over the photos we really thought some had been taken in black and white - but, after the great weather at Milford Sound, it was good to experience this weather as this is the norm. The west coast is renowned for rain and wind.

So we started with a 30km journey across Lake Manapouri.











At the furthest point on the lake, West Arm, we left the boat and were taken by bus 2km underground to visit the machine hall of the Manapouri Hydro Power Station.






This power station is the largest engineering project ever undertaken in New Zealand - and was years in the planning. Work started in 1964 and took 1,800 workers eight years to complete in very harsh conditions. The project involved constructing the power station in an underground cavern, building several access and service tunnels and excavating a 10km tunnel which takes the water that flows out of the station into Deep Cove in Doubtful Sound. All of this was completed using the drill and blast method. The station was fully commissioned in 1972.






There are seven generators and after a few problems the power station now generates over 700mw. Most of this is used by an aluminium smelting plant in the south - and the remainder is fed into the general electricity grid.






As you can only reach this point by boat all the equipment was brought through Doubtful Sound from the sea.....a special road, the Wilmott Pass was then built to go 22km from Doubtful Sound to the edge of Lake Manapouri and the power station. The road is the most expensive in New Zealand - it had to be completely flat as the equipment was so heavy - the generators weighed 284 tonnes!!!

We then went by bus onto the Wilmott Pass to reach Doubtful Sound.






This picture shows the first 13km of the Sound from Wilmott Pass.

Once on the Sound we had a fantastic 40km journey out to the Tasmanian Sea and back....
















When we arrived at the sea we were taken out to the Nee Islands and saw a huge colony of fur seals - who put on a great display :o)























There was great excitement from the crew of 2 when they sighted a Fiordland Crested Penguin - we honestly thought they were going to watch it all night - but it was cute.






The waterfalls were beginning to look spectacular as the rain just kept on falling....
















Another great if wet day........tomorrow we are moving on to the Franz Joseph glacier - further up the west coast.