Day 3--Doubtful Sound

Day 3

While I have decided to refer to this as Day 3 of our travels (because this was the third day we were in New Zealand, in case you hadn’t figured that out yet), this was, in fact, our fifth day of traveling, and I believe it was starting to show somewhat in our dispositions, as nerves began to fray more easily and narcolepsy beset at least me (others may have been dozing off all the time as well, I wouldn’t know). Also, and I know this falls into the category of “things nobody really wants to know,” but I haven’t been able to put a proper deuceki in the “win” category since the morning before we left the States. I did a little math this morning on the subject. We’ve been eating like work mules—three solid meals a day with some snacking to go along with it. All told, we are probably taking in a few pounds of food a day, and, since I haven’t made any proper deposits into the New Zealand waste treatment organization, I gather that I have gained somewhere near ten pounds so far. Where it is all going is some subject of wonder for me, but it can’t be anywhere good. I wonder if it is gathering in my feet and legs, since they seem to be rather sluggish of late. I might have to invest in a box of bran flakes and a barrel of fruit and greenery in the next day or things might start to get ugly.

I also think that I am starting to come down with the cold that Molly and JF brought with them from the Great White North. I started to notice it yesterday when, no matter how many times he repeated himself, I couldn’t make out what JF was saying. His accent, while noticeable, has never been prohibitive towards communication, but, for some reason, yesterday I just couldn’t hear him well enough to make out what he was saying. So I just kept nodding my head and/or laughing whenever I thought it was appropriate. At the time I thought it was because of all the background noise, but, after further consideration, I’ve decided that it’s because my ears are full of fluid. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Love girls speak at volume every time they put voice to thought, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hear them either. Actually, this is an unfair generalization. Molly does not speak loudly. She is very soft-spoken pretty much all of the time. The family has a story about Libby’s mother, whom they call Grammy. Grammy would call over to the house, probably to complain about someone or something, and, after a few minutes of talking and making sure that Grammy was on a real role, Karen would set the phone down on the counter, coming back every once in awhile to say “uh-huh” before putting it back on the counter. This was before the days of speaker phones, but I know they could still hear every word Grammy was saying. It is possible to do this trick with both Karen and Libby, though I have been too apprehensive of getting caught to actually try it. I have had to pull the phone away from my ear a few times while talking to both, though, to keep from doing more damage than years of driving tractor and listening to loud music ever could.

Day 3, by comparison to Days 1 and 2, was fairly relaxed. We did not spend the day running everywhere and cramming as many sites into the day as possible. Instead, we participated in a single, day-long event, a ride out to Doubtful Sound.

Doubtful Sound

The city of Manapouri, which I don’t think we saw much of, so I can’t really comment on, is located on the southeastern bank of Lake Manapouri (at least they are good about keeping the names of their lakes and cities consistent). Lake Manapouri is relatively large (at least according to the scale on the map I’m looking at now) lake that was, for all intents and purposes, one of the most splendid lakes I’ve ever been on. Unfortunately, the weather was not cooperating with us as it was cold and alternately raining (later, as we took the bus ride from the lake to the sound, it would rain, clear up, then snow on us—the weather suffers from multiple personalities here, and like a victim of the mental ailment, one never really knows for sure which personality is going to have control at any given time. I’ve noticed that the weather forecast, which is usually very specific over a weeklong period in the States, will usually only give a temperature range for the current day and pretty much always has a chance of rain in the forecast. Beyond that, they are either unwilling to say or it’s that unnecessary, besides warning if an unusual cold or warm front might be moving in, to make a prediction). We were unable to go outside the cabin on the boat and clearly see the water and surroundings, but what I could see from the boat looked quite impressive.

All along the water, there is the most impressively thick tree life. These trees, I’ve been told, are being held up by a tangled root system that is almost entirely self-sustained, meaning it barely breaks under the surface of the ground. Simply enough, the roots have nothing to go into because the hills surrounding the lake are made entirely of rock. Still, over decades, lichen, moss, small growth and the like builds up until trees can get a footing and then the trees roots all intertwine and support one another.

This sounds like a great idea, and is, in fact, something of a miracle of nature’s determination, but the downside lies in the nature of trees themselves. People who are familiar with trees know that one of their most prominent features is their heft. Nobody has ever lifted a tree and said, “My, that was a lark. Let’s lift another.” Add that to a basically non-existent root system and in most places you would have a recipe for disaster. In Kansas, large trees that have existed for decades, thinking tree thoughts, doing tree things, and weathering dozens of storms of a decidedly destructive nature, will suddenly, and without warning fall on valuable structures and people (who, presumably, have value also) during storms that left no lasting impression. Imagine what would happen if those same trees didn’t dig their roots several feet into the ground as they grew.

And that is essentially the problem that occurs with some frequency on the hills near Doubtful Sound. They are called tree slides. I’m not sure if that’s what they are officially called or not, I believe I remember hearing someone say something about tree avalanches also. If tree slide isn’t the official name, it should be because it has a nice ring to it. Basically, though, what happens is this: one or two trees towards the top of a hill will stop being a tree and start being a problem, falling in the direction gravity wills it to. When a tree falls in the forest (whether it makes a sound or not) it will do relatively little damage, perhaps smashing a few smaller trees in the process. On a large hill with nothing to stop it but trees with no roots, one or two falling trees can cause mass destruction, clearing large swathes of forest. These clearings scar the sides of all of the hills surrounding Lake Manapouri and the Doubtful Sound and it takes decades for the process to repeat itself, but repeat itself it invariably does.

New Zealand desperately disappointed me by not providing me with a good tree slide while we were on this trip. I also didn’t see any volcanoes, though there are no active ones on the South Island. And there was no earthquake, though they apparently get them here (one of the tour guides actually pointed out a large crack in one of the mountainsides and mentioned that it was a fault line—somewhat disconcerting as one travels very near it). All in all, it was a bit of a let down in the natural disaster department.

After the initial boat ride, we took a tour bus across the mountains to meet up with the big tour boat we would spend the next few hours on, the one that would tool us around Doubtful Sound.

Doubtful Sound, incidentally, received its name when the explorer who discovered it (European explorer, obviously, all others need not apply—and I think it was Captain Cook, but I’m not sure if I’m filling in the blanks with names that I recognize from middle school here or not) balked at the opportunity to enter it to look for a place to harbor, claiming the rough seas and narrow passages into the sound made it “doubtful” they would be able to get out again. Obviously, since we cruised out of the sound and into the ocean for a moment then turned around and entered the sound again, he was a full of crap puss. They should rename it the Full of Crap Puss Sound.

Sorry, that was a bit of a stretch. Anyway, the bus ride afforded us some splendid views and the driver, who was in no hurry to get us anywhere either on the way or on the way back, stopped several times to let us get out to take pictures. There were some good, elevated points that allowed us pictures of the group of us with the Sound in the background. Probably these will be the pictures that end up as Libby’s screen savers for the next hundred years.

From the bus we boarded our cruise ship. This ship was designed to carry well over 100 passengers, and we had around thirty that day, so there was plenty of room to spread out. It was two levels and had multiple viewing decks, so we staked out a spot at a table on the upper level. Karen and Darrell had paid for the lunch, so we took a seat and started eating while we waited for the boat to leave port.

For the next couple of hours, we cruised up and down the Sound, branching off a few times to explore this tributary or that. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be said about being on a large boat for a few hours looking at the scenery. One is that the scenery was, as we had come to expect (actually, by this point we were starting to get a little desensitized to the beauty that was constantly flooding our senses, which is a rather sad thing), brilliant. Another was that, still suffering from the effects of traveling, the lull of the boat kept me in a near catatonic state for the entire afternoon. I would doze in and out of conversations and, in fact, carefully considered whether it would be too bothersome to anyone if I had a lie down on the floor and fell fast asleep in a converted fetal position (converted to a not-so-fetal position by my predominantly inflexible frame). Actually, this might have something to do with why I don’t have more memorable comments to make on the subject of how we spent the afternoon. Who knows?

We did get to see three animals that I had never seen before in my life while we were out there, which was very neat. The first were the dolphins, or maybe they were porpoises. Whichever it was, there is a pod of a couple dozen that lives in the Sound, and they are often visible by those on the boat as it passes from one end of the Sound to the other. Our guide informed us that they had been absent for the past few days, so we counted ourselves lucky to have seen them at all. They completely failed to do entertaining flips, and not a single one of them saved my life when an evil kidnapper knocked me overboard during a daring rescue attempt. So I think Hollywood and Douglas Adams may be playing them up a bit.

Next we saw a penguin. A crested something or other, apparently it is very rare. Or pretty rare, that’s right. There were three different types of penguins that we had the chance to see that day, one was very rare, one was pretty rare, and the third was somewhat rare. I think the crested whatever was the middle one. Whichever it was, the penguin used its rocket launcher eyes to destroy a walrus with a laser attached to its forehead, so indeed it was very lucky that we saw it when we did, because it quickly dove back under water when it was done (actually, it appeared as just a black spot with small white areas from where we were—it was sitting on one of the major rocks that block the sound from the ocean). And the last bit of wildlife that we saw was a furry seal, which we purposely didn’t club. It did look very cuddly, though, before it jumped into the water and disappeared. Karen and Darrell informed us that they had arranged to have all of these animals make appearances because it is not uncommon for people to pay for this tour and never get to see one of the types of possible wildlife, and we were able to see three of them. So we counted ourselves lucky.

New Zealand’s wildlife is actually a topic that I took uncharacteristic interest in while we were here, and not because some of it is just so damn strange (though this was probably at least part of the reason). During the drive down from Christchurch, Karen started filling us in on some of the fauna’s local history, and I found myself asking questions that someone who might know the names of specific non-food animals might ask. The two islands of New Zealand, which came together from different origins (the upper was part of Australia and the lower formed from tectonic shift), had spent millennia with absolutely no land mammals. There were, however, a few bats that were native to the country prior to human habitation. One of them was small and spent its days brooding about its lost evolutionary heritage and the other, which was as large as a Dodge Dart, quickly became extinct because of its impossibly poor craftsmanship (this may be, in part, a fabrication of my memory, which is, unfortunately, too intimately attached to my imagination).

What this meant for the wildlife of the island was simple, there were no carnivores to terrorize the birds of the island, of which there were many. Several species adapted flightless lifestyles and none of them developed the good sense to stay the hell away from humans. Thus, when the Maori arrived several hundred years ago, they were literally able to fill their tables with meals of birds that they could walk up to and thunk a crusher on the head. The Maori also had what they felt was the good sense to bring dogs and rats, which they used as a food source, to the island. These animals, and the humans who brought them, had a pretty noticeable effect on the birds of the island, significantly depleting their numbers. The Maori, however, unlike the white folk who followed a few centuries later, had the forethought to notice that they were overtaxing one of their food sources and they backed off. This might have worked to save several of the species had whitie not moved in and made a complete wash of the whole thing.

The white man, in his infinite wisdom, brought several other ground mammals to the islands—stoats and opossums being the most notable—and in a very short time many species had been entirely wiped out and several others were brought to the brink of extinction. Add to that a large feral cat population and you’ve got quite a problem saving what’s left of the birdies that had no problem existing for several thousand years before milk-producers showed up. The birds that existed here were nothing short of spectacular, filling every niche that was left open by the lack of mammals. All of them, I know, have names that I can never remember, so I won’t even make an attempt. Trust me, though, some of them were mighty interesting and a few were even comical.

The most comical of all of them, though, is the kiwi. This small, vaguely football shaped animal with a hooked beak is the symbol of the country and exists in startlingly low numbers now, but efforts to rid some of the small islands of all predators and reintroduce endangered birds to them (an ingenious concept that would be impossible almost anywhere but here, since there are so many easily isolated islands here) has had some success. This is great for the birds but it was very disappointing for me, as I had to cross Punt a Kiwi off my Things to Do While in New Zealand list. From what my brain had gathered, kiwis were everywhere here—picking through garbage, harassing small children, chewing up and shorting out power transformers, you name it—and finding one to punt would be a no-brainer. In fact, the only kiwi I saw was a stuffed one in a museum, which the curator refused to let me touch much less kick.

The most unsettling aspect of this wildlife lesson for me, and probably the reason why I had such an interest in it, was that I was hearing almost no background noise from birds and had spent nearly a day seeing absolutely no animals besides livestock. On the trip down from Christchurch, I actively searched for birds for the first time in my life, and I only saw a handful of them. Coming from where I do, I am quite accustomed to seeing roadkill of a varied and spectacularly gruesome nature several times a day. Opossums, raccoons, squirrels, coyotes and even some deer and the occasional armadillo, all dead on the road. In my yard alone I cannot count the number of rabbits and squirrels that we have living there on both hands, and forget about the birds that are all the time crapping on my lawn furniture. It was a completely foreign concept to me. I could not (and, in many ways, still cannot) conceive of a place where there are no small, furry animals scurrying about. But that is exactly the case in New Zealand. And if things work out the way most people would like them to, all of the non-native, non-pet animals in the country will eventually be eliminated to give the birds a chance to once again live in piece.

I should note that, once we reached Queenstown, I started hearing the familiar sound of songbirds again, and, after spending a few days watching the landscape, I started noticing many more birds flapping around. Possibly all of the birds between Christchurch and Queenstown were taking a bird Sabbath and that’s why there were only a few non-believers out and about. Or maybe they heard a foreigner would be passing through and they wanted to play up my sympathy for their plight by exhibiting just how scarce they really weren’t. It’s a mystery.

Anyway, after the trip, we hopped back on the bus and headed back to the lake. On the way there, we stopped at the Manapouri Power Station, which is an impressive construction designed to siphon power off the country’s greatest natural resource, water. Lake Manapouri naturally sits a few hundred feet above sea level. Doubtful Sound, which empties into the sea, is, obviously, at sea level. The lake drains naturally into the Sound, so it just made sense to harness that energy on its way. The Power Station generates enough electricity to power a few hundred thousand houses. Unfortunately, though, almost all of its energy is used, instead, to power the huge aluminum smelting plant located at the very southern tip of the south island in Bluff. It’s a mixed blessing since the smelting plant accounts for something like half of New Zealand’s gross domestic product (according to Jamie).

We drove a considerable distance into the side of a mountain—which all had to be blown out with dynamite—and sat eagerly as the bus driver executed a nine-point turn at the bottom (I, at least, was eager to see if the bus could be turned around in such a narrow space without creating an Austin Powers moment where the bus was crammed into a space it couldn’t escape from, but I guess they’d probably done the maneuver before). He then let us out of the bus and we were escorted down into the heart of the hydroelectric plant.

Imagine the most stultifyingly boring activity that you can. Now, add a little Paul Anka to the background music, dress everyone in sweat pants and detach your still living and perfectly lucid head from your body and place it on a table facing an empty wall (no, wait, put a pair of the sweat pants on the wall since there wouldn’t be any point to include them otherwise). This is about the level of interest this power plant should generate in anyone who isn’t directly interested in either the creation of electricity or the harnessing of water power. And the whole time we were in there, about twenty minutes, the bus driver stood in the only doorway out, blocking everyone’s exit, so we had to stay in this suffocatingly small viewing area until he paroled us. Either he felt this was an exceedingly interesting opportunity for us and he wanted to make sure we had enough time to fully realize that opportunity, or he was a jerk who liked to make people suffer. Since he seemed like a pretty nice guy up to that point (and was pretty amusing, as all the tour guides had been up to this point), I choose to think that he was personally fascinated by the plant and couldn’t conceive how other people might not share that enthusiasm. It was a great piss-load of giant machinery dug into a remote part of the inside of a mountain, I will give him that much.

After that, we returned to Te Anau and, because we were still knackered (here I am trying to incorporate still more of the vernacular into my work whenever possible, though I think this word isn’t exclusive to New Zealand), we went out for an early dinner at a great little restaurant on the main drag (the Olive Tree, I believe) and went home for yet another early night of sleep. It was another great, if exhausting, day.