Complaint

This picture was made by Ankie.

What will happen if the sea runs dry to the left side of the picture? What will become of sealife? Where are we going to swim in summer? Where are we going to put the sailingboat which Manu is going to buy for me? How powerfull the ships engines must be to sail from left to right?

All serious questions to be answered soon and if not...........?

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, the 15th. November, we will drive from Manapouri to Queenstown and, depending on weather and the road (wet or dry), we will end up in Wanaka.
Wanaka is famous because of:
- lake Wanaka
- the river Clutha (which runs into Lake Wanaka),
- all sorts of outdoor recreation like hiking, mounteneering, fishing, paragliding, bungyjumping,
rafting, jetboating, etc. (all in summer),
- Mount Aspiring National Park,
- wintersports in the winter,
- sheep,
If you love sheep, Wanaka must be heaven on earth.
- retirees (the climate is apperently nice).

We'll find out tomorrow and I will inform you all in due course.

See you later.

Seals on the rocks

Another picture of seals near the sea on the Doubtful Sound. Luckily there was a spell of better weather so the picture is OK.

We are now back at our campground (it's late) and I going to stop for today.

It was a nice day of our vacation and although we had lots of rain (Ankie even got very wet on the boat, when she was up deck, when the boat was going through a big wave) I can advise everybody to visit this part of New Zealand, but you have to love rain and sandflies.

For people who love sandflies this is really heaven.

seals

When we reached the sea we saw seals on the rocks.
This made our (wet) day a little.
Seals like water so they don't mind whether it rains or not.

Waterfalls at the Doubtful Sound

We sailed south to the sea and during "This voyage" we saw many waterfalls, little ones and big ones and all full of water.

Doubtful Sound seen from Milford Pass

To get to Doubtful Sound you have to get of the boat near the Powerstation (They say here "Pewrstaitiun") which we visited for half an hour.

We went down in the ground for 200 meters and saw the big powerturbines. It seems to be New Zealands biggest Public undertaling ever (something like the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas).

After this exciting event we drove over the to the Milford Pass by bus to the end (our start) of the Doubtful Sound and because it was raining like there is no tomorrow (Fokking niet normaal meer) we saw a lot of grey water, rain, grey mountains, grey rocks, grey waves (lots and lots of wind; almost storm) and lots of other grey things.

Lake Manapouri II

Ankie with anti-sandfly cap (present from Kooi and Kim and Jan and Mia). We had to use this gear because there are lots of sandflies (especially when there is little wind and when it is humid).

We had some sandflies in the camper, but they lived only a few minutes (I killed them without regret, ha, ha).

During the trip we used "Deet" and it helped and
we were not bitten (till now).
The flies don't like rain and wind and since we have lots of both life is tolerable over here today.

Lake Manapouri

We are camping at Lake Manapouri, in Southland, New Zealand.

Today, 14th. November, we were to go to the Doubtful Sound, an inlet from the south of Southland which goes op to the north for kilometers and kilometers.

First we had to cross Manapouri Lake (deepest spot is 444 meters) to the Powerstation (Manapouri Hydro Power Station).

Before we left the weather was moreless OK (no rain) but as soon as we took off it started to rain and it rained till we came back (that is now).