Roadtrip Day 4: !!!!!!!! (Doubtful Sound)

Sorry, "!!!!!" was the most articulate I could manage to describe our day in Fiordland without writing an entire novel. Amazing, incredible, beautiful, and holy-son-of-a-gun-I-can't-believe-how-pretty-this-is also came to mind as adjectives to describe the day, but they all seemed rather overused or too long for a blogpost title.

For our day in Fiordland, we went on a cruise of Doubtful Sound (which is actually a fjord and not a sound, but anyway). We started with a bus ride from Te Anau to Manapouri, an even smaller town on the edge of Fiordland (this part is red on the map).

From the town Manapouri, we took a boat across Lake Manapouri. It was so gorgeous we thought the boat ride would be the highlight of the day (it wasn't, the fjord was even prettier, but it was still that good). It had rained the night before, so the mountains were all misty and there were literally hundreds of waterfalls just everywhere. We even saw a few rainbows :) (yellow on the map)

When we got to the other side of the lake, we stopped briefly to tour the Manapouri Power Station. It generates hydro power (Lake Manapouri is quite a bit above sea level, so they have man-made shafts to drop the water to sea level and generate power, and then the lake water can just go out to sea) and most of the power goes to supply an aluminium smelting plant (try pronouncing it a-lu-MIN-ee-um instead of a-LU-mi-num, you'll get to sound rather British :-D) (the green dot on the map)

We even got to go down into the underground tunnels to see the power plant from the inside!

After we saw the power plant, we took a bus across the pass to Doubtful Sound. Again, think heaps of waterfalls everywhere!!! So pretty... (blue on the map, I know, blue probably should have been one of the water bits, but I figured you could handle it :-P)

After the second bus ride, we were actually at Doubtful Sound and we got onto the catamaran tour boat. I'm told the Norwegian fjords are even more spectacular, but I was pretty happy to spend my days seeing views like this one :) (all of Doubtful Sound is marked purple on the map)

Seals!

The white-ish blob in the bottom of the cave is a Fiordland crested penguin. So cool!

My parents and I, Doubtful Sound in the background.

A little bit of history- apparently Doubtful Sound (and probably other parts of Fiordland) were originally explored by Spanish sailors but the English came after them and renamed everything. I don't know what the Spanish name for Doubtful Sound was, but the English named it because they thought it was doubtful that the place could be used as a good harbor. They named it a sound (instead of a fjord) because they wanted it to remind them of the sounds from home (I think a sound is the inlet where a river meets the ocean whereas a fjord is an extension of the ocean inland causes by a glacier, but don't quote me on that one).