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  • Day 444

    Very pleased we bought a head torch

    May 6, 2018 in New Zealand ⋅ ⛅ 16 °C

    We had a bit of a bad nights sleep with the rain but today was another day and it seemed to be a bit brighter. This morning we discovered how quickly the weather changes in Southland, one minute it's sunshine and the next the rain is coming down hard and fast. The clouds move so quickly here and with nothing but ocean until you hit South America you can see why this area of the country has so much rainfall with no islands to take the brunt of the storms rolling in. We opened the curtains to find the chicken sat outside staring at us. He'd been rather noisy during the night but luckily because we parked quite far from the bridge it wasn't too loud for us. Southland is made up of many fiords the most visited being Milfound Sound, the only fiord accessible by road. The second most popular is Doubtful Sound and we made the decision to do a day trip there. The weather for today isn't looking too fab so we drove from our camp spot until we found signal to ring up the company just to double check they'd be running tomorrow if the weather was bad. Turns out they operate in all weather so we went ahead and booked our cruise. We visited the only coffee shop nearby and it actually turned out to be a pretty sweet place. We bought some organic honey collected onsite as well as a loaf of home made wholemeal bread with pumpkin seeds, and the coffees we originally visited the place for. The cafe had an adorable cat who much like Echo at home didn't really appreciate but definitely tolerated me picking him up. Another down pour rolled in while we were in the cafe but we were determined to do something today so we headed back to Clifden to a cave system they have. It's a long tunnel cave which you can explore from one end to the other unguided as long as you follow the signs. Luckily we have a head torch we bought so Nick wore that and I followed up with the hand held one. The whole tunnel takes around 2 hours there and back but we only made it about ten minutes in before we decided it had got too narrow and with our backpacks and my knees not being great we made the decision to turn around and come back out. We met a family at the entrance who didn't even bring torches so they wouldn't of got very far at all. Although it wasn't the grand exploration we had planned the part we did see was pretty incredible especially when it's accessible without a guided tour. With no freedom campsites available on our route for a while we decided to spend another night with our chicken friend before heading to Manapouri tomorrow for our Doubtful Sound tour. We spent the evening discovering how terrible Nick is at Connect 4. He's getting much better at Boggle now and is usually getting at least half of my total score so hopefully his Connect 4 abilities improve from his loss of 10 to 1 (the one he won was accidental and he didn't even notice he'd won). Here's hoping!Read more