Fiordland

The South of the South

We arrived in the very south of New Zealand. Not only did we saw the stunning scenery of Fiordland, but had also some major problems with our bus company, Stray.

After a short one night stop in Queenstown, we made our way to Te Anau. This small holiday village was our New Year’s Eve destination and quite busy, because it is the peak season of summer holiday in New Zealand. Both, Queenstown and Te Anau, are located at beautiful lakes and have a nice waterfront with lots of activities going on.

On the way to Milford Sound we stoped at different other beautiful locations like Mirror Lake. Milford Sound, which actually is a fiord (or fjord as the European would write it), is for many tourists the number one place to visit on the South Island and it was totally worth it. We took an awesome boat cruise and had the best weather.

Gunn’s Camp, our accommodation for the next nights was a very traditional camp, without phone reception, without WiFi, with very limited power and with way too many sandflies. At least we could do some amazing bush walks there and had time to completly relax, without our phones as distractions. At the day we were leaving, we got really lucky, because I was not sleeping to well and woke Maeve up early. We got ready for the day with quite some time until the bus would be leaving, but we discovered, just when we were about to make some nice and relaxed breakfast, the bus was leaving one and a half hour earlier than exspected. We just had enough time to grab all our stuff and go to the bus, skipping breakfast. If we had not got up way too early, we would never had made this and I am not sure if the bus driver would have noticed that we were missing. The problem was: the driver and the other people on the bus decided to do a hike in the morning, but they did not inform us. How are we supposed to know this? If you are travelling with Stray and you hop off the bus, you do not get informed about anything. And this is a huge problem.

Invercargill’s best place to spend some nice hours is Queens Park. It is a wonderful and diverse botanical garden. Further has Invercargill some nice shopping streets, churches and cafés. Still it was probably smaller than most European would expect (same issue with most of the towns in New Zealand). In Invercargill the Stray story continued. We wanted to leave Invercargill in the morning and were there an hour early, because one of the drivers said beforehand they are quite early in Invercargill sometimes. The bus did not come, an hour late neither. We finally phoned the office and found out: the bus got resheldued to the afternoon. Again, no-one told us, they could at least write an email about this. So we spend half the day waiting for the bus and it was still an hour late when it finally arrived in the afternoon.

Now we are back in Queenstown, the adventure playground of New Zealand, for the next few days and soon we are heading to New Zealand’s highest mountain. . .