Running from the rain

The alarms went off extra early, because we wanted to be as flexible as possible with what we wanted to do with the weather forecast not looking too pretty later in the day. So bad actually that we booked a hostel for the following night, as there was continuous rain of many mm's predicted for several days. We drove to Manapouri, Machiel gave his best. So we actually were about half an hour quicker than maps.me predicted.

We entered an office for boat tours on the Doubtful Sound. We'd like to do this, but weren't sure when to do it. There was an option for the afternoon/evening, but as the weather was only going to get worse, we preferred to use the good weather of now to do a hike. After visiting the DOC office in Te Anau, we decided to walk a part of the Kepler track. This was actually disappointing us a little as we had hoped the Fiordland area around Manapouri and Te Anau would be able to offer us a nice 3 hour walk up a mountain to get some nice views before the clouds would hide all peaks for the next 2.5 days. Turned out walking that flat part of the Kepler track through forest was our best option if we didn't want to drive an hour further or pay a watertaxi of 50 nzd per person to bring us across the lake to the start of another steeper Kepler track part. We decided to go for it. After all forest in New Zealand isn't that bad either 😉

It took us most of the afternoon including a late lunch break at a picknick bench of a hut that was also our return point. The forest was nice, there was a river view once in a while and somewhere in the area they also filmed some parts of Lord Of The Rings, so we had a look there too. After that it was time to go to our hostel in Te Anau. We really prefer camping with our tent over hostels, partially because we have noticed so far on our world trip that we tend to sleep better. However due to the ridiculous amount of rain it felt like we had no choice for these few days in Fiordland. The hostel we were at for the night didn't turn out to be too bad.Read more