Te Anau to Alexandra

 We visited the Te Anau bird sanctuary today - quite rundown and tired looking and the government in its wisdom has cut funding for it. Sound familiar? Manned by part time staff. It relies on fees from guided tours and any community organisation like Rotary for funds to keep it going. There were only a few birds.

Parakeet- they only had a handful of old male birds, no breeding pairs.

A takahe, flightless bird. There is a breeding pair.

Teal with chick. Patake.

This is a blue duckling. Kowhiowhio. It’s almost adult size because they grow very fast. But the bird sanctuary gives them up to another sanctuary with more water, and they learn a bit more to fend for themselves. Then they are released into the wild.

Bumblebee.

 Dragonfly emerging!

After the morning’s activity we drove to Alexandra, a few hours drive through the mountain range and past some goldfields. On the way we almost went back to Queenstown, because there are limited roads because of the mountains. The photo below is from the end of Lake Wakatipu, where Queenstown is situated, but it is really hard to capture the sheer steepness of the mountains. The mountain range on the right is called The Remarkables, and they are.

Having found our accommodation in Alexandra, we went looking for ice cream. We were told to go down a road to Rob’s Place which was an orchard farm sort of place. After some hilarity we found it and they sold ice cream with real fruit- I had a cherry one - absolutely delicious!

We’ll welcome the New Year in quietly. Bless you all!

Milford Sound

 Found that it’s not really a’sound’ - it is a fjord! A ‘sound’ is fed by a river, whereas a fjord comes in from the sea. Now that we have correct expression, the day involved a lot of sitting on the bus.

It took about 3 hours to get there from Te Anau, but we did stop a couple of times for photos. Then the ferry cruise only took about 2 hours. There were masses of tourists and heaps of cruise boats to accommodate them all. They all seemed to leave at the same time, so any photo often had another ferry in it. The weather was stunningly beautiful until we started the trip home.

One of the places we stopped at was a small pond called Mirror Lake. Can you see the pattern of water droplets on the surface? It wasn’t raining, the forest was just dripping.

One of the many rivers coming off the mountains - absolutely clear, green water! We stopped at one and I tasted the water - it was quite sweet.

Geology, Girts! I am told that most of the rock is granite and diorite, with some sedimentary thrown in from uplifts. 

Some kind of holly?

Some of the rocks have this orange/red algae on them, which is a precursor to breaking down the rock into soil.

More algae on rock.

Interesting bush - all buds, but I wonder what the flowers would be like.

A kea that landed on the road while we were waiting to go through the tunnel. They always look sort of bedraggled to me.

The entrance to the tunnel, one way traffic controlled by traffic lights. The tunnel was blasted between 1932 and 1952, through solid igneous rock, using around 120 pounds of dynamite for each 25 cm section of rock. Huge job undertaken by soldiers back from the war. (They obviously had dynamite left over) It is just over a kilometre long and loses 800 metres elevation going towards the Sound.

Tiny colony of seals on a beach in the Sound.

Sheer cliffs, so hard to convey the steepness and height of them.

The Tasman Sea between the two mountains at the opening of Milford Sound.

Massive waterfall.

Just massive mountains! Some with bits of snow on them.

Te Anau

 Today we disembarked from the Heritage Adventurer, going through customs and immigration again because we had landfall in Australia (Macquarie Island) and then we’re coming back into NZ. 

We picked up a hire car from Invercargill airport around lunchtime and then took some interesting detours - it was a morning of U-turns, thankfully it was Sunday and very little traffic.

So these photos are from our hotel window in Te Anau, and a panorama taking in the lake.

It started to rain as we went out, so we didn’t go far.

Tomorrow we go on a tour bus and then a cruise on Milford Sound, so brace yourselves for photos of mountains and mountains and maybe some water.

Back to the Snares

 Today was a chance to catch up after the first day when we sailed past the Snares Islands but it was too rough to put the Zodiacs in the water. Some hardy souls ventured out in the Zodiacs this afternoon but Jenny and I stayed on board. Not only was it foggy, there was a light rain and not an animal or bird to be seen. I didn’t want to get my camera wet again.

Gone was the beautiful sunshine of yesterday.

A panorama of the coastline from the ship. The Zodiacs were going to the right and around the headland and up the east coast to maybe another penguin rookery.

And I have an answer about the red band of rock in the cliff face: apparently it is a layer of ash from volcanic activity ( tuff?) that has a lot of iron in it. When that gets wet it oxidises, in other words, rusts.

This is a photo from yesterday on Enderby Island. It is Stella Hut, a small shelter.

Example of a walkway on Enderby. Wherever we went on an island, you weren’t allowed to sit down anywhere or put your daypack or anything on the ground. People going on longer all day walks had to take a poo bag with them, but I don’t know how that worked because there’s no privacy anywhere and no trees to water or go behind!

Again from yesterday, gulls on a cliff face. Thousands. Actually I think these are albatross.

Can you believe these are penguins - again, thousands. All along the coastline.

Tomorrow we disembark at Port of Bluff and pick up a hire car, with Joy joining us for adventures on the South Island.

Enderby Island part 2

 There are some photos that I didn’t put in last time because sometimes they just don’t load properly. Anyway here they are.

So this is a Kakaraki - a red-crowned parakeet- which seems to be quite rare, or at least hard to find. We were lucky that we had a birder on our Zodiac who pointed it out!

Pretty pink flower. Enderby Island gentian.

Another pink flower. A mega herb - Anistome. The herbs are called’megaherbs’ because they are huge with much bigger green leaves to catch as much sun as possible in a cloudy overcast climate.

Rata tree flowering. Quite spectacular.

Grass tree- Dracophyllum. Although here it’s really shrub size.

Another mega herb - Bulbinella rossii.

Interesting geological feature in the cliff face. What is that red layer that’s pretending to be an NZ version of an aplite vein?

Enderby Island - cruise and walk

 Enderby is the northernmost of the Auckland Islands and home to the biggest sea

lion breeding ground which is actually quite small. We had to get off the ship for a couple of hours this morning for the crew to do a mandatory drill, so we cruised around the cliffs of Ross Island. We have been blessed with the most perfect weather- bright sunshine today and very calm seas.

So I don’t know how I managed to do this but there are 2 photos of the penguins and rollmops we had for lunch!

Some granite columns just for you, Girts!

Yellow eyed penguins

Teals - flightless birds.

Enderby Island shags, or cormorants.

A light-mantled sooty albatross nesting on the cliff face.

The sea lion colony on the beach. Do you see the cute little pups? And the skua - the bird at the very top right edge of the picture. They wait in case a pup is born and they can steal it.

Campbell Island - cruise and walk

 My hardest day yet! Probably walked about 5km, up some steep bits, to albatross nesting, but I didn’t go all the way to the top. But that was in the afternoon, this morning we just went on a Zodiac cruise into the bay to a sea lion breeding place.

A mega herb - beautiful leaves!

Huge sea lion

Some of the colony, with little pups.

A Campbell Island shag, endemic to the island.

A skua. There were many around the sea lion colony, preying on pups.

Our landing spot on the island.

Example of the boardwalks we were on.

Buttercups - introduced together with dandelions.

Pretty white flower.

Pretty pink flower.

Albatross on nest.

Would you believe a greenhood orchid!

And another little orchid!

Interesting fluffy bird. Someone said it’s a Pippet, but I am not sure.

Plant - mega herb - with an orange flower.

Panorama from near the top of the hill.