Saturday 09 February

Te Anau
Milford Sound, what a place, what a day. I have never seen anything like it. We were picked up in a coach just before 8. The Milford Road was much better than I had expected, two lanes of traffic, one either way, except over bridges, which happens everywhere. One stretch was very steep and had a vertical drop of hundreds of metres at the edge, but nothing worse than we have encountered elsewhere. In retrospect we could have driven in ourselves quite easily, but it gave John a chance to really enjoy the scenery. Our coach driver/guide gave a very humorous commentary in the usual Kiwi understated fashion, Aussies being the victims of most of his jokes. It was a very useful commentary, I learnt lots of interesting things, such as the origin of Tea-Tree Oil. It comes from a native NZ bush, which grows abundantly in the bush. Captain Cook realized that it had medicinal benefits and boiled the leaves up to give to his sailors in the form of a tea, as an antiseptic and to prevent scurvy, hence Tea Tree. The driver also knew all the best vantage points to stop at and give us time to take photographs. The coach journey itself was an important part of the trip. I have never before been on roads where the mountains were so close, from 2,000 metres, diving vertically to the road edge. There is no top soil, trees, mostly Beech, cling precariously into a bed of lichen and moss created by the perpetual damp. Further away from the road the Temperate Rain Forest has created a dense undergrowth of ferns and other plants between trees and bushes. It was indeed a one-off experience.
There was also the boat trip down the fiord as far as its mouth and the Tasman Sea and back. The U-shaped glacial valley is so different to the V-shaped river valleys I am more familiar with. We stood on the top deck for the one and a half hour trip. It was very cold. I was wearing 6 layers of clothing, but no gloves and by the end my hands were numb and had no feeling. We dashed inside in time for a mug of hot coffee before we docked. We are really pleased we decided to do the trip. Tomorrow we go in the opposite direction to the larger, but more remote and inaccessible Doubtful Sound.
We have spent a long time this evening trying to decide what to do next, or rather where to go. The weather forecast for the whole of the southern part of the South Island is pretty dire for Monday and into next week. Having played around with all our options we have decided to just stick with Plan A, take a scenic route down to Invercargil on the southern tip and take it from there, it's going to rain wherever we go.
Te Anau has not been as we expected. We were told that the two things we were sure to encounter here were rain and sandflies. So far we haven't had either. Rain is forecast for tomorrow and evidently the sandflies are usually worse just before the rain. We have not had any in Te Anua, but there were quite a few at Milford today. We have found the greatest densities on the DoC sites in the bush, one of the big disadvantages.  As for the rain, there is in fact not so much in Te Anau itself, about 1,200 mm a year. Milford recorded its highest annual rainfall in 1988, it was 9,200 mm and 500 fell on one 24 hour period, that's similar to the annual rainfall for Norwich.
I've only been here for two and a half weeks and my experiences very limited. I hadn't realised that there were so many issues between the Maori and the non-Maori populations. I use the term non-Maori deliberately because there are largish communities of Asian, Chinese and Pacific Island peoples, who are more recent immigrants. Last Wednesday was a national holiday, Waitangi Day, to commemorate the signing of The Treaty between a coalition of Maori Chiefs and the Colonialists in 1840. It is still being disputed as the contents of the documents in translation has some discrepancies. We were in a motel last Monday and we watched a national news programme on TV and in the lead up to the Waitangi Day celebrations many of these were discussed. There was also a feature on the introduction of 4G networks to NZ and who would own what, as I understood it the Maori parties wanted a guarantee that they would have sole ownership of part of the network.
We haven't actually encountered any Maoris camping. This is similar to our experiences in South Africa, where only the whites camped. However it does seem to me that the attitude to the indigenous people here is very different. I was talking to a NZ woman and I used the word 'pakahe', which I understood to be the Maori term for non-Maoris, and she told me that they, the non-Maoris, don't like it. They consider themselves all to be New Zealanders. Most New Zealanders I have ventured to discuss this with have gone out of the way to stress the fact that even though it might not be obvious they have mixed blood, and are clearly proud of it. They want more integration and seem to be making every effort to promote this. As I haven't actually met any Maoris it is possible that I only have one side of the story.