Welcome back Kotter!

Sorry for the extened absence (but I believe, Mother, I did warn of it)! Since I last wrote I had a few days work at the hostel (where I'm tied to the grounds for the entire 24 hour period), the my friend Ian & I took off down to the bottom southwest corner of NZ to Fiordland. This is an amazing national park & world heritage sight that was carved out by glaciers and is now very young rainforest.

It took about 9 hours of driving to get there the first day when we stayed in Te Anau, the nearest town, with our friend Ada. The next day we wandered Te Anau for a bit and then went on to Milford Sound, the centre of the park where we stayed the next 2 days. Because it is all part of a national park, there is nothing in Milford - nothing!! Most people just do it as a day trip, but I decided we needed a couple days there. It was stunning and so relaxing to have no phones, email, tv, or anything to tie us to the world! We did a bit of walking, but there weren't as many tracks as we had hoped for near there. The second day there we joined one of the boat cruises (this is the thing to do in Milford) and had a great morning on a small boat seeing all the waterfalls (bonus of it being a rainy day) and the Mitre Peak, the highest sea cliff in the world. The mountains were truly fantastic and so hard to grasp the enormity of. Unlike anything I've ever seen! The highlight though was the dolphins! We had three bottle nose dolphins come over to the boat and, being a smaller ship, the stayed and swam with the boat doing flips and spins for about 20 minutes! Ian & I lucked out and had the best spots to see them, being no more than 1 metre from them!!

In one of the harbours of the sound there is an underwater observatory. It goes 9m under water where we became part of the 0.002% of the world to have seen black and red coral! It was incredible - we were in a round room with glass on all sides, able to view things you could only normally see when diving. It's really special to because in the sound plants grow much closer to the surface than normally. There is no soil in the mountains (they're granite), so when it rains (which it does more often than not) the green dye from the plants runs straight down to the water. This makes the water much darker on the surface and shades it from light. All this tricks the plants into thinking they are at a much greater depth than they are. Black coral is so rarely seen because anywhere else it grows in the world it is at a depth of about 70m. The normal human diving capacity is 30m.

So, after all that excitement and learning... on the drive back to Te Anau we had sunshine so we stopped for walk all over the places and saw lakes and these amazing rapids! The road wasn't great, very windy and got stepp very quickly as we drove from sea level to the snow line in about 3 minutes. I was very glad not to have forced Lucy through that with all 4 of us in the middle of winter! A large portion of the road is a big avalanche zone (found out when we got back it's illegal to drive the road without snow chains... teehee) and there were several areas where the snow had come across the road, but thankfully had been cleaned up! There's a 1.2km tunnel through a mountain too, The Hommer Tunnel. which is probably the scariest bit of road I have ever had to drive!! Very cool though! Once out of it and at the snow line again, we stopped at a safe zone (due to avalances, most of the road is a no-stopping zone) to take more pictures. As we were I heard a rumble of thunder and joked to Ian that it was an avanlanche - he laughed and then said "no, it is!" We could see in the distances a small avanlanche coming down. I was so impressed!