We drove from Wanaka to Te Anau, via Queenstown. Queenstown is the biggest city we've seen in awhile, and we took the opportunity to grease the wheels of commerce. We've started buying Icebreaker shirts to supplement our existing wardrobe. There's two bits of shtick with them: First, you can enter a "baacode" from your garment and find out which farm the wool in it came from, and second, they claim to be odor reducing (meaning that you can wear them multiple times without washing). We're going to test the second to the breaking point.
As for the "baacode" - well I love puns, so that's a plus. I was a little disappointed in the execution, though. I expected to be able to track the wool down to an individual sheep - instead it shows you the farms where your wool came from and offers up a video from each farm. "Normal" people (whoever they are) probably prefer the video approach.
Somehow we ended up eating at a McDonald's in Queenstown. It's turned into our default place. After a good passive aggressive march across town where we can't agree on a place (or time) to eat, we'll both end up so hungry that we just go to McDonald's in defeat. On some level it feels like a squandered opportunity to be eating McDonald's in a foreign country. On another level, I loves me some french fries.
Te Anau is a place you go so that you can go other places. It's a nice small town, built on a lake, but most people go there so that they can visit the Milford Sound area. You can stay in Milford Sound proper, but there's nothing to do there at night and two places to eat. Te Anau has 6 or 7 places to eat, and nothing to do at night...
We arranged to go kayaking with Rosco's Milford Kayaks on the 6th, and arranged for them to pick us up in Te Anau. The pick up is nice, because it's about an hour and a half drive from Te Anau into Milford. On the way in the driver took the opportunity to discuss the cancellation policy.
It turns out that if they cancel your kayaking trip you end up going on a boat tour of the Sound and a tour of the underwater observatory. Guess what we got to do...
It wasn't just raining, there were also winds in excess of 100 kph. Obviously I was disappointed, but I was also glad they canceled the trip. I had mixed feelings about the tour - but I also didn't want to get up at 4:30 am the next day to try again. So I spent the next couple of hours on top of the boat, bundled up in my rain gear, taking hundreds of pictures. Hundreds of pictures that didn't really turn out worth a darn.
Here, though, are a couple to give you some idea of the weather:
Yep, I'm mister sunshine!
When we got up on the 7th there was more rain. After being cooped up during our stay in Franz Joseph, though, we decided to go ahead and try a short hike. We hiked up to the Howden Hut, which was a 2-3 hour trek. There wasn't anything to see (courtesy of the fog/clouds) but it beats sitting in the hotel room all day.
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