We did a trip to Doubtful Sound. This started from the little town of Manapouri, where we boarded a ferry which took 50 minutes to take us across Lake Manapouri to West Arm, the site of the Manapouri power station. This is also the start of the road which climbs over the mountains then descends to Deep Cove in Doubtful Sound. A bus took us up and over that pass, and down to where we boarded the Fiordland Navigator, our home for the next 24 hours.
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| The view across Lake Manapouri. |
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| The ferry which took us here to West Arm, with the power station intakes visible across the water. |
The Manapouri power station is actually a couple of hundred metres under ground, inside the mountain. A huge volume of water (500,000 litres per second) flows from Lake Manapouri into the tunnels feeding the turbines below, and then flows onwards for 10 kilometers through the tailrace tunnels to empty into Deep Cove. The electricity generated here is used almost entirely to power the Tiwai aluminium smelter in Bluff.
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| Sue at the top of the road, looking down into Deep Cove. |
This road is completely cut off from any other, so everything here including the power station and the buses came in by boat - either across the lake or via the ocean and up Doubtful Sound.
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| Under way aboard the Fiordland Navigator. |
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| The operators welcome passengers into the bridge at any time. A good place to shelter from the wind! |
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| Seals relaxing on their wind-swept rocks at the edge of the Tasman Sea. |
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| They have little sails, just for show. |
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| Early morning after sleeping the night afloat in First Arm. |
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| Beautiful reflections in the calm morning waters. |
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| The bush mirrored in the water. |
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| The Fiordland Navigator. We went for a ride in the tender, while others went kayaking. |
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| Kayakers setting off from the stern platform. |
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| Sue joined those who jumped in. The top couple of metres is almost fresh water, because of all the rain. |
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| That's our ship over there, giving an inkling of the scale of the landscape. |
The geography of the sound is impressive, with sheer rock walls rising over 1,000 metres from the water much of the way. In many places the same rock wall continues below the water, allowing the ship to come in very close without any risk of running aground. The deepest places are over 400 metres deep.
Doubtful Sound is actually a fiord, technically speaking. A fiord is carved out by glaciers, whereas sounds are formed when a landscape sinks into the sea, as is seen in Marlborough Sounds. At least this area is called Fiordland!
