Dunluce Bed and Breakfast Te Anau

... next up was the "Chasm".. apparently we would be sheltered by the rain under the beech trees….I was soaked from head to toe, oh and the "Chasm" you may ask? Haven't a clue what it looks like, as I was too busy trying to see my way out back to the coach to get dry! From what I did see, it reminded me of Wales a little, so I'm sure there are plenty of waterfalls to see there ...

... around on the roof. It then seemed to loss interest and went off to scare so one else. Kind like a child with a caged bird. Seriously though talk about a close encounter, no wonder David Attinbourgh has grey hair.
I drove on through the steeply downward slopping Homer tunnel heading for Milford sound. It was raining, it rains between 7-8m a year here so this wasn’t a big surprise. It made all the views deep and misty though, which was good and made me forget ...

... Rings, but come on if you are actually looking out your back window at places where it was filmed you could appreciate the moment. T"he other spaceship was named Skylon and her driver was a lady from the states named Jemma. It would be the first of several encounters we would have with Jemma, all of which were really helpful. It turns out she was from the States and had been debating taking a job in the remote town of Glenorchy. I believe the ...

... vast snow capped mountains that totally dominated the landscape. As we were heading west once more the flat lands rapidly turned into epic valleys surrounded by towering mountainous regions. We had a brief picnic next to a field of sheep and I took over the drive towards the small town of Te Anau.

Te Anau itself is like most other slightly populated towns in New Zealand: it has slightly more traffic and a couple more shops. It’s the ...

... that it just won't do it justice. I walk on    Just as the sunlight on the mountains begins to take on that late afternoon look to it, I reach Lake Manapouri. It's quite a moment, because although it's not the end of the Track, it's sort of a sign that I'm indeed going to make it. It's the finish line before the finish line. Tonight's hut is here, just on the Lake. Once again, I'm not alone. There is a guy from here in New Zealand and his Canadian girlfriend, as well as another Canadian ...

... slide show. Mosquito bites 5("sandfly") Wildlife: NZ fur seal Mollymawk Blackbacked gull Tomtit Fantail Bottle nosed dolphins NZ wood pigeon Transport: Crampervan Bus Catamarran ferry Coach Cruiser ship-fiordland navigator, flat bottomed, keel-less, mastsails only for show Tender boat Yvette: started by being picked up by coach at 12.00am and taken for cruise part 1 across lake manapouri. then we went by ...

... was also thankful that I was staying in Te Anau, rather than trying to make it the whole way back to Queenstown in one day. On our stop in Te Anau on the way to Milford sounds, I had stopped in the tourist information to book a glow-worm caves trip. I also asked what else there was to do in the area, to which her answer was "not much really". Mmm, I could see this was going to be an exciting couple of days! No matter, I jumped on the boat to ...

... you could hear was the screaming waterfall somewhere near. As the boat bumped into the rock sides of the cave we looked straight up into what looked like a night sky, sparkling turquoise polka dots all over the ceiling. Surreal. But Kelly had to fight the urge to jump out of the boat and swim into the darkness back to where we came from - it was a touch claustrophobic. Especially when our guide maneuvered the boat into a cubby the size of a bread box so that we ...

... like
clusters of stars, each single light being a glowworm, lit in order to
attract bugs to it's dangling strings of paralyzing gels. We probably
hit some with our faces because the boat would bang side to side in the
cave and Lu's arms kept banging into the cave walls. It was pretty
surreal and you'd never be able to do something like this in the
states. Afterwards is when they ...

... company answered their phones or returned our messages, so we headed off to catch up on email instead.

As we'd scoped out a couple of internet places in town on our bikes which looked pretty dodgy, we took the car to a backpacker's hostel to try their internet instead.

This turned into an extremely frustrating hour of typing/shouting at the computers, which had ...