Bus to Boat to Bus to Boat and Back

Hi, Katie Jo Bob. Look at the back of the bus we rode on today. It has kiwis all over it.

On today’s agenda: a visit to Fiordlands National Park, which contains more than three million acres here in the very southwest of New Zealand. Its gets more rain than most other sea level places in the world, up to 5,290 millimeters per year according to one source, and 8,000-plus according to another. I will no longer make generalizations gleaned from a single source. I have learned my lesson.

My alarm woke me up at 7:00 by playing Ojala. I had time for a shower and a tea and an e-mail check before a giant bus picked us up on the main highway at 8:45. Our driver’s name is Curlz.

We re-crossed some of yesterday’s topography, with gentle low hills and the occasional soft eggwhite peak. Much of the land is divided into 800-acre blocks that farmers have acquired only by being lucky enough to win a lottery for an option to buy. I learned that if you keep sheep, there are three things you need to do to maintain them: dip, drench and sheer. Consider that before you just go out and buy lambs.

Fiordlands is overrun by deer, which were introduced by early Europeans. Kiwis have made the best of it by shooting them from helicopters and exporting the venison primarily to Germany. There are five kinds of Cervidae kept in captivity around here for their meat: wapati elk (the one we saw yesterday with the mane down its neck), red deer, white-tailed deer, seka deer and reindeer. In winter when there’s not much food, they’re fed hay and silage—and swedes. Other invasive species are mammals—stoats, ferrets, weasels and rats, brutal killers all—that have made native flightless birds extinct. You could say that the birds are sitting ducks for such beasts. And then there’s the despised possum, brought here for its fur, that spreads TB among those endemic creatures that haven’t already been eaten.

The bus made a few stops before dumping us in the township of Manapouri at the big eponymous lake that has four arms, as uncreatively named as those in Lake Te Anau: North Arm, West Arm, South Arm… and, oops, there’s another south arm that they no choice but to call Hope Arm. Once disgorged from the bus, I got a bag of chips and boarded a boat to cross the lake. The last few days I’ve told you what I read about lakes that are among the deepest in New Zealand. Apparently this one is even deeper, but I no longer trust anyone on this count. You make your own decisions. We passed steep wooded slopes, bare sheer cliffs and more waterfalls than you can shake a stick at, plummeting and sidestepping their way down the densely vegetated rock face. The falls are a byproduct and benefit of visiting here in the rain, which it began to do quite enthusiastically. There were literally hundreds of falls. They appear only in crappy weather and vanish a few hours after a downpour.

Across the lake we boarded another bus, this one to take us over what is claimed (but I don’t believe it) to be one of New Zealand’s most remote byways: the Wilmot Pass Road. A fifty-minute drive brought us west to another boat and the start of our Doubtful Sound tour. Captain Cook named it from The Endeavor in 1770 because he thought it unlikely that there was enough wind to fill the sails. He didn’t land because he felt it too risky. He may have been right about that but he was wrong about something else: this is not a sound. A sound is v-shaped, carved by river. This place was created by glacier, and if you could see several hundred meters under the water, you’d see a u, not a v. What they have in common is that they’re filled by ocean waters. There are fourteen fjords in Fiordland. So our pilot-guide said. I don’t believe him either.

Once again, due to heavy rain as well as the howling wind whipping the ocean into mist, the edges of everything were soft and the color shades of grey and blue: “a typical squally Fiordlands day,” said our captain, “when the wind swirls and funnels through the fjords.”

Like a fool, I kept going aboveboard to snap photos in the rain and salt spray, which temporarily trashed my lens. It wasn’t worth it. Most of the resulting photos sucked. Sometime this morning my pricey filter fell off my lens and I suppose will spend the rest of its days in the dirt on some scenic NZ overlook. I hope it’s happier now. It’s been trying to abandon me this whole trip.

Our boat driver steered us out to some rocky outcroppings glazed with fur seals. Out there at the edge of the sea, it was rough enough to send cups and saucers flying and make at least one person pukey. The wind skimmed the top layer of seawater and whirled it aggressively into the sky and into the cameras of those attempting to document it.

When our fjord tour was over we got back on a bus. It stopped at various scenic places. In one, the moss was colored all kinds of rust, yellow, green and bronze.

And then there was a waterfall overlook. I dutifully took a picture of the vista…

… before I realized what the real shot was.

The final stop seemed very discordant to me. After all this stunning, untouched nature, we drove through a two-kilometer tunnel through the hardrock into the the bowels of a hydropower station 200 meters beneath Lake Manapouri. I’m not much interested in engineering or megabusiness, so I was bored. Luckily it was only a fifteen-minute stop.

A few minutes later, the bus deposited us back at the dock for the final boat ride across the lake. And there on a table, waiting for me next to an abandoned kiwi fruit, was my naughty lens filter, looking sheepish and dirty. I accepted it back into my life but, like certain individuals I could name, know that it’s only a matter of time until it leaves me again, so I refuse to take it into my heart.

Just minutes before we docked, clouds thinned, rain stopped and the sun crept out shyly. I could almost hear them saying, “Neener neener.”