Our day trip to Doubtful Sound was like being in an altered state. Start to finish, beginning with a boat ride across Lake Manapouri, then a bus ride and a visit to an amazing underground hydroelectric station, then on to a great boat built specially for fiord sightseeing, and one waterfall after another, one incredible view after another, one glacial valley after another, for hours. Saw penguins, too. The skipper was so skilled, getting us very close to the islands at the mouth of the sound even though there were big swells and lots of wind, so we could see the penguins and seals—fur seals. It was blustery and rainy and misty and then on the way back across Lake Manapouri, the final stage of the trip, the sun broke through and we had about an hour on the top deck getting a sunburn and oohing and aahing over the mountains some more. The sun is sooo intense here. If I leave my sunglasses off for fifteen minutes when it’s sunny, I start to get a headache. Need a hat, too, or I can feel it boring into my forehead, frying my brains—even if the temperature is cool, 60s or so.
I still get disoriented all the time, have to re-teach myself the directions many times a day (“okay, sun coming from behind over my right shoulder, it’s 6pm, must be facing south”, etc.) In the absence of obvious landmarks (like the Southern Ocean, which we stared at for a while yesterday afternoon), I find I am often turned around, because some instinctual sense of the sun always being in the southern half of the sky is completely turned on its head! It was so strange to be facing south looking at the ocean and have the sun be behind my back.
Yesterday we drove from Te Anau to Invercargill (not a place you want to stop, except to buy groceries or gas) and then on to the Catlins, an area along the south coast that is so pastoral, rolling green with sheep and cattle, lots of little streams, remnants of native forest and some tree plantation, old houses, lots of corrugated metal and decomposing wood, and wide white beaches pounded by waves. Went to the almost southernmost point in the country, Waipapa Point, and
the wind must have been blowing 60mph. It was freezing. We spent the night at a motel in Papatowai, with a view of a gas pump—it was also a gas station and store. Today we are further east, on the Pacific side again, in a tiny town called Kaka Point with two big beaches separated by a rocky point.
There are many tidal estuaries that turn into mudflats at low tide, many many birds—herons and spoonbills and oystercatchers and stilts and gulls and terns and land birds too. We ate dinner last night (ham sandwiches and a bottle of Marlborough wine) in our car parked next to an estuary, watching two royal spoonbills and a white-faced heron among other birds poking about in the mud. The wind was so fierce we had to be careful with the car doors so they didn’t blow right off the hinges. Today it’s cool and breezy with big puffy clouds rolling by, and we took a long beach walk and later are going to visit a hide down the coast a few miles where you can spy on yellow-eyed penguins coming ashore a couple hours before sunset. That is, around 7:30….
It’s light until 10PM here, and still almost four weeks before the solstice. And the sun is up at 5:30 or so. I loooovvvve these long days, they feel so luxurious, as if there is plenty of time for everything you might want to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment