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.

One if by land, two if by air: Above the Southern Alps

Tuesday, 16 February 2010  Lake Hawea Station, Wanaka Airport

This was a big day for sightseeing.  We signed up for a 4-hour air tour over the whole mountainous region of the central South Island.  It was a great day for photography.  Brief summary: we flew north an circled around Aoraki/Mt Cook, then southwest and landed at Milford Sound.  After about 45 minutes on the ground we took off and flew around Mt Aspiring to the east, and then back to Wanaka.

All aboard!

Here is Mt Cook, also officially known by its Maori name Aoraki, the highest peak in NZ at 3784 m (just over 12,000 ft).  It consists of 3 peaks, which you can see in this picture.

The third one, farthest in the distance, is the summit.

From there we flew over range after range of the Southern Alps, heading southwest.  Each range was separated by a valley, most of which have an obvious stream draining them.

The major rivers are classic braided streams in a broad alluvial valley draining into the sea - in this case the Tasman Sea off the southwest coast of NZ.

Here is a high alpine lake.  Its outlet is a cascading waterfall (which I didn't photograph because it wasn't visible from the angle of our route.)

The approach into the tiny aerodrome at the head of Milford Sound required precision landing by our experienced pilot.  The final approach includes a sharp low-altitude turn to line up with the runway just seconds before touching down!

Here is the view seaward.  

Milford sound is the only one of the many fiords in NZ that can be reached by paved road.  Every day dozens of tour busses crowd the road through the mountains out to the visitor center at the head of the fiord.  The harbor is very busy with tour boats coming and going all day.  We had cruised into and out of the fiord aboard the MS Volendam on our Holland America cruise back in mid-December.  It was very early in the morning, it was raining, and it was beautiful in its own way, with all of the waterfalls cascading down the sheer granite cliffs.  But we didn't go in far enough even to glimpse the built-up tourist area, so this was a new experience for us.  Once you are out on the ground, you realize what a beehive of activity it is.  The helicopters and small planes alone keep the place humming, with one or the other taking off or landing virtually every five or ten minutes.

By the way, I think I have explained the difference between a sound and a fiord in an earlier posting, but here it is again.  These so-called sounds on the southwest coast of New Zealand are misnamed.   They are actually fiords.  A sound is a drowned river valley - i.e., it was a river valley draining to the sea in an earlier time when the sea level was as much as 100 m lower than it is today.  With today's higher sea levels, much of the river valley and all of its estuary are now under hundreds of feet of seawater.  There are authentic sounds on the north coast of the south island, Queen Charlotte Sound prominent among them, part of the extensive system known as the Marlborough Sounds.  Look at a map of New Zealand at the northeast top of the south island near the port of Picton to see what I mean.

In contrast, a fiord is a drowned glacial valley - the outlet where a glacier flowed into the ancient sea during the ice ages, carrying with it all of the detritus it had scoured from the mountains.  The cross section or profile of the glacial valley is markedly different from that left by an ordinary river because of the enormous erosive efficiency of the glacier.  All of these features in Fiordland National Park in New Zealand are fiords - duh, I wonder if that's why they named the National Park?  They are the same sort of feature as the fiords of Norway, for exactly the same reasons.

Here we are approaching Mt Aspiring from the west.  This mountain has the classic shape that geomorphologists call a "horn", the archetype of which is the famous Matterhorn in Switzerland.  It is caused by three intersecting glacial cirques where three distinct arms of a high glacier each scours one face off the high terrain, leaving just the point in between.

We had the incredible good fortune to fly by just as two mountain climbers were trudging along the final ridge up to the summit.  No joke - these pictures are undoctored and authentic.  I asked the pilot how much he had to pay the climbers to time their final ascent to coincide with our flight!

Here is another one of those fantastic braided river valleys carrying the melt water from the remaining glaciers down to one of the many lakes in the area. New Zealand has done a great job of harnessing the energy potential of these lakes with hydroelectric power now providing 55% of net electricity generated.  On the Waitaki river drainage alone there are at least 8 dams and hydroelectric power stations.

Lake Wanaka on approach to the Wanaka airport at the end of a fantastic flying adventure.  WOW!  I've got some great High Definition video, too, that I would love to share with you in person some day.

  

Lake Wanaka, New Zealand

Saturday February 13 - Thursday February 18, 2010

Wanaka and Lake Hawea Station

The first priority as soon as we entered Wanaka was to buy Paula a new camera, as I described in a previous post.  That accomplished, we had dinner, during which Paula tried out several of the different settings on the camera using Tyler as the hapless subject.  These shots might give you the impression that Tyler always has his mouth open.  Those of you who know Tyler will not be surprised.

We stayed in a backpacker hostel for two nights - the first time we had tried such a place - and found it surprisingly OK.  It had a variety of accommodations available: sleeping on the floor in the hall, bunk beds in a dormitory, private rooms with shared bathroom, and a few doubles with ensuite bathrooms (i.e., you get your own bathroom right in the room, like a normal motel).  We had one of the latter.  It was small but clean and adequate.  We were subsequently warned by some other travellers we met that they aren't all that good.  From the point of view of stuffy older adults (like us), all-night parties and drunks barfing in the halls lost its appeal decades ago.  But in Wanaka we had none of those problems. 

On Sunday morning we attended worship service at a little Presbyterian church in Wanaka.  The pastor was an American expat, a lady who had emigrated to New Zealand about 40 years ago.  The evening before, we had walked from the hostel several blocks to the church just to scope it out and check the service time on their sign, and we were accompanied by a young woman from Michigan.  She had recently graduated from the University of Michigan, and was planning to join the Peace Corps in a few months.  In the meantime she and her brother were touring New Zealand, working as "WWOOFers" as they went along.  So what's a WWOOFer you ask?  It stands for "Worldwide Workers On Organic Farms".  It began as a tradition of young people being given lodging and meals for a few days by organic farmers in return for performing 4 hours of work around the farm each day.  The concept has now expanded to include Bed & Breakfast places and youth hostels.  If fact, the entire housekeeping crew in the hostel where we stayed were WWOOFers.

We visited the Department of Conservation visitors' center for Mount Aspiring National Park.  They had a wonderful display of large metamorphic rocks that had been sliced and polished on one face to show the beauty of the stones.

After the first couple of days we moved about 20 km away to Lake Hawea Station and stayed in a restored historic cabin that had been used for decades as a field house for sheep shearers.  

As in Australia, the term "station" denotes a large ranch and farm, often including government land that is leased from the Department of Conservation and includes much of the high country that can grow grass for sheep.  Lake Hawea Station has been in the same family for 90 years, and it is still a major operation raising especially Merino sheep for their extra fine wool.  Paula had an opportunity to go out into the countryside looking for plants and climbing partway up into the high country.

Lake Hawea is in the background in this photo, looking back down from the hill.

Paula bought this jade marble in Hokitika specifically to use as a scale reference in pictures like this.  The marble is about 2 cm in diameter.  Isn't this a pretty shot?

One evening we drove back into Wanaka to attend a performance of the New Zealand National Youth Brass Band.  They were wonderful!  The organization had held auditions in the major cities of New Zealand and selected about 40 young musicians who are now spending their summer touring with the band.  Many of them had been playing their instrument since third or fourth grade, and they were all virtuosos.  It never ceases to amaze me that a kid can get to be that good in six to eight years.

From Fox Glacier to Wanaka

Friday, February 12, 2010  Driving from Franz Joseph Glacier to Wanaka

Leaving our accommodation in the village of Franz Joseph Glacier, we drove the short distance down the coast to Fox Glacier and walked up a nature trail to get a closer view.  Along several such tramps (NZ for "hike") we have encountered breath-taking suspension footbridges, just wide enough for one person at a time, passing high over a river.  Here is the one over the Fox river, being crossed fearlessly by our intrepid botanist.

I won't bother to take up server space to show you a picture of Fox Glacier.  Trust me, it's just another big dirty chunk of ice when you get right up to it.  Oh, what's that?  You really really want to see a picture of the famous Fox Glacier?  Well, alright.  Here's a nice closeup:

Further down the coast we discovered the beach along Bruce Bay where generations of creative visitors had made an art form out of piled rocks and driftwood.  The beach is naturally covered by a wide variety of colorful rocks, mostly metamorphic with all of the layers and veins.  Here is a sampling of the whimsical creations.  This one, of course, shows the most whimsical creation of all, the one in white, red, and black: