Day 9: Driving rain

Te Anau, New Zealand

We left Queenstown this morning heading to Te Anau, where tomorrow (weather and roads permitting) we will be taking a day trip to Milford Sound.

It was a great day for driving, with strong winds battering much of the South Island today, and rain. We saw footage on the news of a caravan being blown over. Even so, the lead story on the news was Australia eliminating England from the Rugby World Cup and how this was expected to damage England’s economy because no one would be going to the games any more, or watching them in the pubs.

But I digress. It was a relatively short driving day for us, about 173 km. We stopped for coffee at Kingston at the foot at Lake Wakatipu before venturing carefully on to Te Anau. It was still raining and windy when we arrived, and the Milford Sound road was closed. Not a good sign, although better weather is forecast for tomorrow.

We arrived in time for lunch, then checked into our motel, which is a complete contrast to our room in Queenstown. Kramstable has his own room, and it’s all very cosy.

We considered doing the glow worm tour but decided since we’ll be having such a big day tomorrow, we wanted to rest up a bit this afternoon. We went to the Fiordland Cinema instead, to see a short film flying through the Fiordland National Park. It was simply spectacular, and it’s a gorgeous cinema with huge plush seats. What an amazing place!

We contacted our tour guide for tomorrow to confirm everything was good, and he says that everything is booked in and they’ll be picking us up tomorrow morning as scheduled. Really looking forward to this!

Dinner was at a nearby hotel. It was an all you can eat banquet, which we hadn’t known when we booked, but the bonus was that kids ate for free – and Kramstable loved it. We were the first people there, so got the full attention of the chef. The food was great, and the desserts were enough to break even committed sugar-free devotee me. One of them was this amazing trio of chocolate, vanilla, raspberry panna cotta blancmange something straight out of the 70s. The chef told us that he insisted his staff learn to make puddings, because no one makes puddings any more. It was good.

After that it was back to the room to watch Doctor Who. We party hard here!