Doubtful Sound

Tuesday, April 21st, we went on a cruise of Doubtful Sound. Known for its wilderness and wildlife, Doubtful Sound is the second largest of the 14 fiords in Fiordland National Park and is three times longer and 10 times larger than Milford Sound. On all these tours and cruises the guides are always mentioning things like that "this lake is the 3rd deepest lake in New Zealand" or "the 5th longest fiord in the fiordland area." In Maori legend, the godly figure Tu Te Raki Whanoa created Doubtful sound/fiord with the assistance of four young sea gods who carved out its sheltered arms. We also learned that fiords are valleys cut from glaciers rather than valleys cut from rivers.

Before we were able to enjoy the natural beauty of Doubtful Sound, the tour first took us to experience the very man-made Manapouri Underground Power Station. The underground power station is considered New Zealand’s greatest engineering feat. It is the country's largest hydroelectric power station and is unique in that nearly all of it is built underground. The only external signs are the above-ground control building, a switchyard and two sets of transmission lines that loop across the head of the arm on their way to join the national grid.

I've included a schematic for all you engineers out there. The yellow spiral illustrates the 2 km tunnel the tour bus had to drive down to get to the main underground power station. It left me a bit claustrophobic - crowded, hot bus driving in underground tunnel. Must keep breathing...

Oh, but then we got to the main machine hall, power generating area. It looked all James Bond/Austin Powers. There was even a clock on the wall recording how much energy they were producing and a big red button that looked important. To be honest, I wasn't really listening to the girl giving the tour - she spoke very quietly with a distinct accent about how many tons of rock they had to remove to make this room or something like that.

I didn't really understand this detour to the underground power station - maybe other people were more impressed. I just wanted to follow the glow-in-the-dark running man signs out of there and back to fresh air.

Soon enough the bus made it to Doubtful Sound. It's so much more remote here than Milford Sound which is much more popular. But more on that tomorrow.

Once on the boat on Doubtful Sound, things started improving. We saw these bottlenose dolphins playing right next to our boat.

We even saw this Fiordland Crested Penguin swimming in the water. They are quite rare and only found in this part of New Zealand. We were lucky to be able to see them.

We also saw this large colony of New Zealand fur seals catching some sun on rocks at the entrance to Doubtful Sound where the fiord meets the Tasman Sea.

The weather was perfect for our Doubtful Sound cruise - very sunny and calm. Fiordland measures annual rainfall in meters raining about 200 days every year. So we were getting lucky with the weather.

The water was like glass leading to lots of photos like these with lovely reflections.

Dolphins, penguins, seals and glassy reflections of beautiful mountains? Yes, Doubtful Sound certainly delivered. We actually had so much fun on this trip that we decided Fernando had to see Milford Sound as well since it's so close and famous. So we cancelled another 2 day tramp we had planned (not too difficult since we were still sore from the Kepler) and planned on doing the Milford Sound cruise the following day.