More Drivel About our Trip

Back through Queenstown and Frankton and down Route 6 along side yet another glacial lake (they literally are everywhere) on one side and “The Remarkables” mountain range on the left. There is a sign pointing to The Remarkables ski area but I couldn’t see any slope with an incline that one could ski on. It would be more like falling off a mountain with skis on your feet.

 

Like most roads in New Zealand, we had this one almost to ourselves. The speed limit at its maximum is 100 kilometers per hour (62 mph) and everyone seems to obey it religiously. I sometimes found myself creeping up to what is my usual preferred speed on back roads, 70 mph but this I fear would have brought me some unwanted attention from New Zealand police so I backed it down to 100 k.  Oddly enough, when everyone obeys the same speed limit (and doesn’t go much below it either) traffic moves very smoothly.

 

We stopped for lunch at the Lazy Bones Café in Athol about halfway to TeAnau. Again we found a tiny establishment in the middle of nowhere with a selection of food that would rival the largest restaurant in the States. The variety of dishes and desserts was enough to completely boggle the mind. I finally just ended up pointing at something and saying “I’ll have one of those” because I just couldn’t make up my mind and didn’t know what half of the things were anyway. Whatever it was that I got was delicious. While we were there some other motorcyclists came in.  Two were on rented Honda Gold Wings, following the same tour that Lowell Roark had taken a few years earlier. They were dressed in rented rain suits but both had ordinary street shoes on their feet which I suspect brought them some wet toes before the day was over. Two other motorcyclists, a husband and wife each on their own Harley came in. They were from New Zealand and were just wandering around for the fun of it like us. They had just been to TeAnau and Milford and were on their way back to the northern part of the south island where they lived.

 

We headed out on the last 70 miles to TeAnau. From Athol the road makes a right turn through Five Rivers across what it appears to me to be a large glacial plain. There are enormously high and jagged mountains all around but a perfectly flat wide open space between them. One can easily imagine the ice sheet a mile thick sitting on this plain for 10,000 years ironing out any imperfection.

 

We reached TeAnau about 3:00 pm and located an information center near the waterfront which directed us to a vacant B&B room in the home of one Marie Thomas,about a 20 minute walk from town.. While we were there, booking the 3 hour tour (no Gilligan’s Island jokes, please) of Milford Sound, a BMW R1200 GS pulled in ridden by a man dressed in Aerostitch gear..  He walked in and spoke to the lady behind the desk with what was clearly an American accent.  He was from Texas and had been on the road since mid- November and had no plans to return home for another 2-3 months. He had been in Australia and now New Zealand and was considering to going down to Chile before turning around and heading back north as the cold weather set in down here south of the Equator.

 

Our room for the night at Marie’s was nicely appointed and on the opposite side of her house from the living area, affording us privacy.  We walked in to peruse the town, find an internet point and eventually something to eat. The only internet access in town was at the local photo processing place where I paid 1.00 for 10 minutes to get on line to stay in touch with the office, sitting at a picnic table on the sidewalk with miniature laptop, tapping away..

 

Dinner was venison at the Red Cliff café. The food was excellent but the service extremely slow. We were there more than hour before our food arrived and by that time Brenda was getting a bit low. We wandered back to Marie’s through ordinary neighborhood streets and promptly fell asleep in our room.  We would head out early to make the tour boat connection up at Milford Sound.

 

I haven’t yet been to the Going To The Sun road in Montana yet,  but if it’s any better than the road from TeAnau to Milford Sound then I will have to construct a new definition of “ good” This road sweeps alongside a lake for many miles, winding through broad curves with amazing scenery, then plunges down into a valley with impossibly high mountains on each side, bordered with wonderful rocky creeks.  Then it rises again to the entrance to the Homer Tunnel, a 1.2 kilometer down-sloping hole in a solid rock wall hundreds of feet high.  There are now lights in the tunnel, for what little effect they have, but it’s still a puckering feeling to enter the darkened tube going downhill to an exit you can’t see.  It’s a one way tunnel which now has a traffic light at each end to prevent misunderstandings of order.  It once was just on a first-come first-served basis, I’m told, which must have led to some interesting confrontations in the middle. When one emerges from the tunnel on the downhill side, the switchbacks are steep and tight for the next kilometer or so, then the road heads more directly downhill to the harbor where the tour boats begin.  There is a visitors center and parking area at the bottom, with a walking path of about a quarter mile to the actual boat terminal.  The path winds beside the harbor with excellent views of the water and the reflected mountains and offers a close up contact with some of the unusual vegetation and birds in the area.

 

The Maori word for what the Europeans named Milford Sound is Piopiotahi which apparently means “single thrush”. The story is that one of the minor Maori gods decided to challenge the mother god but was unable to complete the challenge. She defeated him easily and turned him into a thrush and he was caused then to fly back and forth at the mouth of the sound as a signal to others not take the mother god lightly.  An early version of “If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

 

Our cruise was a 3 hour trip from the harbor out to the mouth of the Tasmin Sea with a brief stop at the underwater observatory called Milford Deep. As the boat slowly cruised up the river the enormous peaks rose on both sides of us so steeply that the boat could cruise right up to the edge where we could have reached over the rail and touch the wall. In fact on two occasions the captain brought the boat so close to water falls that some of us on the outdoor observation deck got soaked. As we moved through the sound you can see how the glaciers carved this U shaped valley between the mountains over the course of at least five separate ice ages over several million years.  In two spots one could see “hanging valleys” where other glaciers had intersected with the main one and had been chopped off as the main glacier made its way further down to the mouth of the sea. There is still one remaining glacier, Pembroke, which is a pale shadow of its former self. I have seen photographs of it taken less than 50 years ago which show it filling the entire valley coming down to the sound. Now it is but a thin ribbon of ice a mile or two further back up the valley and just barely visible from the water. A very real demonstration of global warming at work. I have seen a dramatic glacial valley at Yosemite but while that is a wonderful place it certainly cannot rival what we have seen between TeAnau and Milford. We got back to the terminal about 3:00, put our stuff back together and got on the bike for a leisurely ride back.  Somehow we lucked out to be between the pulses of tour buses and motor homes and for a quite a while had the road all to ourselves.

As one approaches the Homer tunnel from the down hill side it seems that you are going into a completely impenetrable wall of rock so huge as to be unimaginable. Its only as you come around the last bend that you see there is a hole in the rock which seems at first glance entirely too small for a vehicle to go through. Going up the tunnel was a bit more exciting since I had failed to remove my sunglasses and just had time to pull them down my nose and look over the top to keep my eyes on the road in the dark tunnel. But as they  say here “no worries mate”.

 

As we came down out of one of the large valleys I decided that it was time to pull over for a few minutes. We pulled in to the parking area at McKay Creek where a small RV was parked. As we got off the bike the women from the RV came over to say hi. She and her husband owned a pie company of the North Island and apparently had done quite well with it. They were both retired, considerably younger than us, and were just traveling around four months in their RV. She showed us a map marked in pink with all of the places they have been since arriving on the South Island on January 29th. There were few roads left unmarked.