Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to post this entry in the right place before I headed out onto the Milford Track, so I’m posting it in the right place now and will update you on how fantastic the Milford was in a little while. Just pretend this was posted on the 12th like I meant it to be!

I’ve been staying in Te Anau taking a bit of a rest after doing the Routeburn Track, and I’ve run into a lot of people I’ve met in previous places–Johanna that I traveled with in Wanaka and Queenstown, Nick that I did the glacier walk with in Fox, and James that I seem to run into everywhere–plus I’ve met a few more cool people as well.

My first day in Te Anau really didn’t consist of much except spending excessive amounts of money–namely on my new camera as well as a silk liner for my sleeping bag since it’s nowhere near warm enough at night (see my second Routeburn entry for a description of that). Nick, Rachel, and I all cooked dinner together at the hostel which was great since I’m very sick of cooking for myself every night! We managed to turn a bunch of interesting ingredients into a very gourmet dinner, complete with New Zealand red wine.

Yesterday I met up with Johanna and we went to the cinema in an attempt to avoid the deluge of rain outside. This cinema is a special one because it mostly shows one film, called “Shadowlands.” This is a breathtaking 30-minute film of helicopter shots over Fiordland, which is by far the most spectacular part of New Zealand. The guy that filmed all of the footage then decided to build the Fiordland Cinema since he had nowhere to show it. For $10, it was much cheaper than getting in a helicopter (which can cost up to $900)! By the time we left the theatre, it had completely quit raining and the sun had come out, so we went to the Te Anau Wildlife Centre on the lakefront. There is supposedly a large range of native birdlife in this park, although we were a bit disappointed when we could only see about 6 birds total in the many different enclosures–and most of those were sleeping! We did see one old takahe, a funny-looking bird with a massive red beak that was thought to be extinct until the 1940s when a small population was found in the mountains across the lake from Te Anau.

After the visit to the sleeping birds, Johanna offered to drive me to Lake Manapouri, 20kms away where she was staying. I jumped at the chance since I had wanted to go there anyway, even though I wasn’t sure what was there besides boats that go to Doubtful Sound (the second largest fiord in Fiordland and so named because Captain Cook knew his boats could get in to the harbour but he didn’t think there was enough wind to get them out). We ended up running into James, a guy that I’ve run into in seemingly every town in New Zealand, and going for a walk to Fraser’s Beach and along the lake to Pearl Harbour (yes, fun name, I know). James and I had fun taking just about a million pictures of the mountains and the lake while Johanna just watched us, probably stunned that we could take that many pictures of the same thing!

Johanna stayed in Manapouri while I went back to Te Anau to get ready for the Milford Track and to visit the Te Anau Glowworm Caves. The two hour long trip started with a cruise across Lake Te Anau on another startlingly gorgeous day in Fiordland. We all stood on the top deck admiring the various “fiords” on the lake (really just arms of the lake surrounded in more huge mountains). The tour through the caves was probably about 30 minutes in length. We spent part of the time walking through the caves (which are carved out of limestone and sandstone by water from the Orbell Valley above) and part of the time in a boat in the complete darkness, floating on one of the calmer stretches of the river as glowworms lit the walls and roof of the cave up with their green glow. Even though I’ve seen glowworms a number of times, they still seem magical (at least, until you think about the fact that they are actually burning their poo to attract insects to eat for dinner). It wasn’t quite the same experience as blackwater rafting through the caves as I did in Waitomo three years ago, but I was definitely a lot warmer this time around. Afterwards, we got to watch infrared video of a glowworm at work catching its prey, which was pretty cool and something I’d never seen before. Overall, for a very tightly controlled tourist attraction that sees nearly thousands of visitors each day, it was still pretty cool.

The next day, it was off to the world-famous Milford Track, which runs from the top end of Lake Te Anau into Milford Sound, one of the most spectacular fiords in Fiordland. I have to go because I’ve only got 2 mins left of internet, but I will write about it soon. It’ll probably have to be a 2-parter again because of everything that happened (all good–no body/camera breaking this time!).