A bad start to the day. Woke at 8 to the sound of heavy rain. Maybe I should have taken that shot of the view of the Alps from the window last night...
We wander around town including a quick sideline to the doctor's -- it's amazing how NZ$40 can get you an appointment in short order,or maybe the doctor's was a bit quiet. We booked ourselves a Christmas day Doubtful Sound day trip. Everyone seems to rate the Doubtful Sound over the Milford Sound trips so I hope it's worth the NZ$190 per person.
We dropped into Stuart somebody's Puzzling World which takes NZ$ 6 off you to see some standard illusions, or NZ$ 9 if you want to get lost in the "modern" maze. More interesting to adults were the free board puzzles ("re-arrange these pieces to fit this shape" etc.) which abounded in the foyer. We took lunch on the shore of Lake Wanaka as the weather was clearing and managed a couple of snapshots.
Mt Aspiring would be middling were it ever visible.
The old road to Arrowtown runs through the bare tussocked hills ending in a rapid succession of hairpin bends as you drop backdown into the plains. We were headed to Arrowtown as the first of several LOTR film locations. The town itself wastes no time on such mercurial interests and sells itself completely on its Gold Rush history. Curiously,our super secret tip-off (a giveaway about a 4WD LOTR film location tour) suggested a bridge was involved. The local area map says no bridge here (ENOBRIDGE ?). Obviously the tour company would be keeping some secrets so [based on our failure to find the easiest] we decided not to bother driving 50+km out into the boonies from Queenstown in search of more vaguely remembered scenes from the film.
Queenstown is a much bigger place than the humble dot on the map suggests. In fact easily the busiest place since Auckland [by numbers of people around and about]. Not good enough for us and we headed off for Te Anau. This road doesn't have a great deal to keep the mind interested -- the scenery is kept at a distance -- and after a section stuck behind a truck we had to pull over for forty winks. [Where we stopped] they had a sign saying "population 106" and their height above sea level. I recalibrated the GPS being fed up with being declared underwater.
That done we steamed into Te Anau in good time. The lodgings are standard backpackers fare: our room has five beds (a normal bunk bed and a double-at-the-bottom bunk bed -- which has been quite common) and is one of twenty or so [rooms] in the block sharing toilets, showers, kitchen etc.. The rest of the site is a classic holiday park with motel units through to tents with us backpackers stuck away in the corner under a different name to the rest of the site. We're charged NZ$ 50 for each night. An old boy stumbles in [to reception] and asks about the Internet: NZ$ 1 per six minutes. Ouch! He shuffles back out to his little Toyota Hiace campervan.
Steamers Beach, Te Anau S45.42466 E167.72012 Elev. 182m.
Te Anau is quite quiet as well. I'd half expect there to be a reasonable throng of tourists milling about even if NZ doesn't follow the merry song and dance that is Christmas in the UK. There's a sole string of bells across the street, Santa enjoins us to spend from a few shop windows and one of the serving wenches wears a gold crown. But that's about it for Christmas over here. And a pleasant change it is too. There was a funny advert on the TV last night: Three things you shouldn't forget this Christmas, #1 sunscreen. I forget the others but they weren't as funny.
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.