Feb11 we flew from Wellington to Queenstown, rented a car and drove 3+ hours to Lake Te Anau. Queenstown is roughly in the center of the map below. The blue line shows our driving trip from QT to Lake Te Anau and to Milford Sound.
Te Anau is a long, thin mountain lake and it is the largest lake, by volume, in Austrail-Asia. The surface area is not that huge but it is DEEP. This is glacier land and the lake was carved out of the mountains in the last ice age, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Some parts of the lake are over 400 meters deep. I expected it to be quite cold but was surprised to find that the water at the beach was actually fairly comfortable for swimming.
Local kids have a lot of fun jumping off the pier at the south end of the lake.
The next day was one of the highlights of our trip so far – a cruise on Milford Sound. According to Wikipedia: “It has been judged the world’s top travel destination in an international survey (the 2008 Travelers’ Choice Destinations Awards by TripAdvisor)[2][3] and is acclaimed as New Zealand’s most famous tourist destination.” It is in Fiordland National Park and it is a true Fiord, carved out of the granite mountains by glaciers during the last ice age. The sound runs 9.3 miles in from the Tasman Sea and has cliffs on either side up to 3,900 ft nearly straight up from the waterline.
We enjoyed perfect weather for our cruise – a real treat. Milford Sound is the wettest inhabited place in NZ and one of the wettest in the world. It averages about 30 ft of rain each year with some rain occurring in nearly 200 days each year. So we were very lucky!
Hine Te Awa (“Girl In The River) Falls comes from a pool that has a hydro-electric generator that supplies the entire town of Milford Sound. (Hydropower accounts for 55% of all electricity generation in NZ.)
The drive to and from Milford sound is beautiful as well, winding through dense forests and along a number of picture-perfect mirror lakes.
Gunn Lake is one of several lakes we stopped at to take pics, put our toes in the water, and practice skipping stones on the surface. The trip also includes going through Homer Tunnel, a 0.75 mile single-land bore through the solid granite. Construction was begun in 1935 but the tunnel did not open until 1953.
Because it is one-lane, there are direction control lights that allow cars to go one way for about 10 minutes then the other. This does not operate in winter and spring because the cars would have to wait in avalanche danger areas. Traffic is less in these times, but cars do meet head-on at times. If you are very careful and slow, you can squeeze by.
The next day was another event we had been looking forward to, the Glow Worm Caves. We boarded a boat that took us up and across Lake Te Anau to a limestone cave that has a stream running through it.
Inside the cave are thousands of Glow Worms that attach themselves to the ceiling by silk threads and then run more threads, hanging straight down with a sticky mucous. These next pics I clipped from another page because no photos were allowed.
The backend of each worm contains oxyluciferin. They can combine this with luciferase to create bioluminescence. They turn this on when they want to feed and off when they have caught something.
The hanging threads can be up to a meter long and any flying insect that hits one, is stuck and will be eaten by the Glow Worm.
The whole thing was about 2 hours and well worth the time and cost.
After a quick lunch in town, it was on the road again, back to Queenstown. More on that in the next post.
There’s such an ancient feeling to so much of the land there. It reminds us that we are just a small blip in Time…