Wanaka to Te Anau Gateway to Milford Sounds

We left Wanaka in Spock (our spaceship) and headed around the snow fields to Queenstown, with a brief stop off in a town who's draw card was a bunch of giant fruit sculpture.. so we stopped off and took a picture and drove off again,!.. as you do.

El looks beautiful framed by fruit by the way



We drove into Queenstown in the rain but the scenery had changed again into tall canyons that had a red colour. Queenstown had a much better feel than Wanaka, more of the ski town feel I expected. We stopped off to check the road condition of Milford sounds and discovered that the road was closed and that they were flying around with dynamite in a helicopter blowing the hell out of the potential avalanche spots. I joked with the girl in the info centre that that would make a great tourist tour. So the girl said that we could go to Te Anau the gateway to Milford sounds and stay the night there and hope that the road would open the next day.



We drove down and again the scenery changed to a more bleak landscape. NZ is amazing like that, that every two hours the landscape keeps changing, so most of our pics have been landscape shots instead of people like the ones in Asia.

Te Anau was a little town on the edge of another lake, one thing that the south island is not short of: mountains, sheep and lakes. The only events to do were to watch a film made about Milford Sounds or go to an underwater cave with glowworms, unfortunately the cave was flooded and all the glow worms had probably drowned, so we watched the film instead. The cinema was specially made for the film and had the best chairs, nearer to sofas really, that I have ever ever sat on. The film was directed by a local helicopter company owner and made over ten years, so all the shots were made from a chopper and some of the footage was amazing, we could not wait for tomorrow, fingers crossed that the road was open.

We prayed to the weather stone