Lake Manapouri and Doubtful Sound

Fri - Mon, 19-22 Feb: Possum Lodge, Manapouri

We drove from Lake Hawea Station through Queenstown on the shore of Lake Wakatiri on to Lake Te Anau and stayed for three days in Manapouri next to, you guessed it, Lake Manapouri.  Queenstown is the quintessential tourist town.  We just passed through it this time, stopping briefly at the visitors' center long enough to arrange lodging for a stay in Queenstown Feb. 23-26.  We took a lesser-travelled road from Wanaka to Queenstown over the pass in the Crown Range.  This road was only finally paved a few years ago, and is now the highest paved road in New Zealand at 1076 meters.  Here is the turnout viewpoint at the summit of the pass.

Here is the view from the pass toward Lake Wakatipu and Queenstown.

The views at Lake Wakatipu are pretty good, too.

The mountain range that encloses one side of Queenstown is called The Remarkables.  It's not named after a cartoon family of superheroes.  It is called that, supposedly, because the initial surveyor looked at his figures, realized that the range lies almost exactly on a north-south line, and said, "That's remarkable!"  There are only a few ranges on earth that line up north-south, most prominently the North American Cordillera (Rocky Mountains).  They look like shark's teeth to me.

On to Manapouri.  On Sunday, Feb 21, we booked a cruise on Doubtful Sound.  It was a complicated affair.  First we boarded this cruise boat for the trip across Lake Manapouri.

Here is the official cruise photographer taking a picture of Tyler taking a picture of him, and vice versa.  

There is no paved road to Doubtful Sound, so the cruise company first took us on across Lake Manapouri to the far end where the Manapouri Hydroelectric Power Station is.  We spent about an hour touring the power station, which has a fascinating history and represents a major engineering achievement.  Lake Manapouri is at about 178 m above sea level.  The sea, as a remote arm of Doubtful Sound, is not far away laterally, but it is on the other side of a massive granite mountain.  So, clever Kiwis, they drilled a hole straight down through the granite, put the hydroelectric generators at the bottom of the hole, and continued boring the so-called tailrace (water outlet) through the rock to the outlet at Doubtful Sound.  They also bored a 2-km spiral road down and around to the machine room at the bottom, which we drove down in our tour bus.  Extraordinary!  Turning around for the trip back up was very interesting.

From there they bussed us over a gravel road over the Wilmot Pass and down to Doubtful Sound, where we boarded a bigger tour boat.  Here is the first view of the fiord from the pass.

The weather out on the fiord varied from very cloudy to downpour rain.

Waterfalls are prominent features all along each of the fiords.  Some of them run all year round, but many of them only flow when it is raining - - which on average is two days out of every three!  The prevalence of these falls is due to the steepness of the glacial valley walls, which left several of what are called "hanging valleys" - a hallmark of glacial terraforming.

There are many interesting features out in the fiord.  This seal island out toward the mouth is just one example.

Overall we enjoyed our Doubtful Sound experience more than the better-known Milford Sound, and I would recommend the one over the other for anyone who visits New Zealand with limited time.

Before we left Manapouri be visited a preserved stand of large native totara trees.  These photos will give you an idea, but it's just nothing like actually walking among them.  Even the video I took doesn't adequately convey the size of these things.