We awoke the next morning to find the ship docked at the Port of Bluff. After some immigration and customs formalities and a good cooked breakfast we disembarked. We said our goodbyes on the quayside and went off to collect our rental car. Before we left England we had not made any plans for the next few days; at Rodney's suggestion we had waited until we could talk over with him, on the ship, what we wanted to do after the voyage. As a result he had drawn up an itinerary for us which included a 'touristy' trip to Doubtful Sound (somewhat less people than the usual tourist trip to Milford Sound) and some bird watching. We stopped off briefly in Invercargill to do some shopping and post some cards before driving on to Manapouri where we found a hotel and booked our trip to Doubtful Sound for the next day. We drove into Te Anau for lunch - you could hardly buy lunch in Manapouri, even by New Zealand standards it is a one horse town. Even so we were finding the large number of people we kept seeing disconcerting after so much isolation on the ship. We were wise to keep off the beaten track while we got used to so called civilisation again. When we drove back in the evening into Te Anau again for dinner we saw several falcons hovering over the bushes waiting for their supper too. We finally ate our first truly stable meal for four weeks in a very nice little pizzeria. The restaurant was BYO (bring your own) so I had to nip next door to the liquor store to get a bottle of wine to drink with the meal; an interesting new experience in choosing a wine.
We slept well on solid ground that night. Although I found one disadvantage of being on dry land was that Barbara started snoring again - she didn't snore at all on the ship; I wonder whether it was the motion or the penguins. When we woke up we found that the overcast and rainy conditions of the previous day had given way to brilliant sunshine and clear skies.
The trip to Doubtful Sound took us first on a boat across Lake Manapouri and then by bus across a gravel pass and finally in another boat on Doubtful Sound (which is really a glacial fiord) out to the Tasman Sea. Although it was clearly a managed tourist trip it was still very enjoyable; it would have been better if we had gone before the trip on the Academik Shokalski then we might not have noticed the fact that everything was timed down to the last minute and how the passengers were tourists rather than fellow human beings. Nevertheless the trip was well worthwhile. The scenery is breathtaking. On the Sound there was a pod of dolphins swimming around, you could see the reflections of the snow clad mountains in the still sea water, the vegetation was untouched by man and it must be as close to paradise as most people can ever get. Even we, who had been to Enderby, Campbell and Macquarie Islands, were impressed.
The track between the head of Lake Manapouri and Doubtful Sound was built so that an hydroelectric power station could be installed taking water from the lake out into the Sound. Now it is only the tour company who use the track to drive their buses between the lake and the Sound. The views from the track are very good, in particular we stopped at one point to look at the vegetation. The forests that grow on the mountains on the west side of the divide have no soil for their roots; instead they are rooted down in a bed of mosses, lichens and ferns. Where we stopped you could see all layers of the forest together. Lichens grow on and just inside the rocks, these provide anchorage in cracks for mosses that can grow to several metres in size. Small ferns grow up through the mosses and provide a thick base for the Rata and Beech trees of the forests. As the root systems are not firmly bedded, sometimes a tree near the top of a near vertical tree covered cliff will come away; when this happens it brings down all the trees below it in a 'tree avalanche'. We saw several places where such natural disasters had occurred, scarring the sides of the Sound.
At the end of the trip we went inside the power station to see the generating plant. It was remarkably quiet considering the vast amount of water that was flowing through the eight turbines to generate some 100 MWatts of electrical power
