Friday 08 February

Te Anau, Fiordland
It was an early night, just after 9 again. We sat round the fire until it had died away, then the cold wind forced us into the car, the first time that has happened, and we played a hand of Crib before angling down into the warmth of sleeping bags and a duvet. I woke a couple of times in the night, cool but not cold enough to force me to get up and find some warm clothes to put on. We woke early, 06.30, and were drinking coffee and eating our muesli breakfast by 07.00. I had 6 layers of clothes on, it was 6C, even hands clasped round the hot coffee mug didn't keep warm. We had packed up and were away before 08.00, retracing our footsteps through Glenorchy and Queenstown. Once again we appreciated the wonderful scenery in the early morning light.
We made very good time and were in Te Anau by 11.30. We went straight to The Real Journeys booking office to see about availability of trips to both Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound as we have decided to do both. This is a once in a lifetime trip so we will make the most of it. We fixed a trip to Milford Sound for tomorrow and Doubtful Sound for the day after. Then we headed off to find somewhere to stay, we decided on The Kiwi Lake view Park as being the nicer of the two in Te Anau. We had already decided that because of the notorious reputation which Fiordland has as being one of the wettest places in the world with between 7 and 8 metres of rainfall a year, and for having the greatest density of sandflies we would get a cabin rather than camp. However all the en-suite cabins were booked, and a basic cabin would still mean we were out in the night for the loo so we have upgraded ourselves to one of their luxury studios. Luxurious it is too. We are on the first floor of a very nice studio, a kitchenette and nice bathroom and large patio doors leading on to a small balcony with wonderful views over Lake Anau.
We went the short walk by the lakeside into the small town, just a few streets, really here just to support tourism to the fiords. As well as folk like ourselves, there are also lots of hikers, leaving for and returning from the testing hikes over mountains and deep into Fiordland.
We have an early start in the morning, 07.30 but that's not early for us, when we will be picked up for the 120 km coach trip to Milford along a road which is so treacherous that a decision is made each day as to whether it is open or not. It is closed for heavy rain and at 19.00 every night. The weather forecast for tomorrow is not so bad, maybe some rain in the afternoon, so we should be OK. However after that it is all downhill, it's due to rain all day on Sunday so Doubtful Sound looks like being a wet one. It doesn't matter about us being wet, but the visibility will not be so good and neither will the photographs. We watched the weather forecast on our large flat screen TV, and then checked it out with the free internet connection which comes with our luxury studio, and it gets worse. We have booked here for 3 nights then we planned to go further south, to Invercargill on the southernmost tip of the South Island. However at the moment in seems that the whole of that Southern area has at least a week of torrential rain ahead of it, so we are reconsidering where to go next.