Te Anau Glowworms and Doubtful Sound, the far South West of New Zealand

Last time in Exploring New Zealand’s South Island: Our Campervan Adventure Part 6, we had departed Stewart Island and had arrived back in Bluff after crossing the Forveaux Strait for the fourth time. We ambled along the front to the Bluff Camping Ground, a tidy little camping ground which let us leave our campervan there for a couple of nights at a reduced rate whilst we journeyed to Stewart Island. We picked up the van and headed out of Bluff and up the State Highway 6 through Invercargill with her impressive St Mary’s Basilica Catholic Church and then the State Highway 94, heading for Te Anau and thence to Manpouri campsite.

What is at Te Anau you might ask? And the answer is glowworms! Glowworms in a cave to be precise. I have to say that the whole excursion was a bit of a tourist trap, but not in an unpleasant way. We parked up on the lakeside of Te Anau, a fairly typical looking New Zealand town but on the banks of a very attractive lake called unsurprisingly Lake Te Anau, and then got on board the ferry that took us to the other side of the lake to where the caves were.

We were treated to a talk, this time a very informative one and not too long, then we were split into groups and shepherded into the caves. The walkway was narrow, a lot of running water, lots of places to hit our head, but mercifully we avoided those. Glowworms sound very romantic and cute, but they are in fact their life-cycle is pretty gruesome. In New Zealand, glowworms are the larvae of the fungus gnat, a mosquito, and they drop sticky silky threads from the cave ceiling and then turn on their glow which comes from an organ equivalent to the human kidney. The glow attracts other insects like moths who mistake the light for moonlight or starlight, fly up to it, get caught in the threads and then are killed in a pretty horrific way and eaten by the larvae. Nice. The main part of the trip was a boat ride through the caves where you can view the glowworms, and seeing as it was the day before Christmas Eve, the staff were going home early, one gave us a very nice solo rendition of “Silent Night” whilst we floated amongst the glowworms, a lovely way to end our trip to the caves.

Photography unfortunately was not allowed, so I have nothing to show you here of the glowworms themselves at Te Anau, however I have included a shot of glowworms we visited on North Island near Tauranga to give you an idea of what you can expect to see.

The boat trip across the lake was very relaxing the water almost mirror like, but with a dramatic darkening sky with clouds draping rain over the hills, and we caught some wonderful reflections of the mountains on the surface of the lake. We got back to Te Anau , back to the campervan and then headed for our overnight stop at the picturesquely sighted Manapouri Holiday Park. We settled in for the night ready for an early start and for me, what I hoped would be one of the highlights not only of our trip to South Island, but one of the highlights of our two years in New Zealand.

Look at any advert for traveling to New Zealand, they will invariably mention Fiordland National Park and almost always invariably will see an advertisement for a cruise on Milford Sound. That is a fantastic cruise and you should definitely do it if you can, and we’ll cover that in a later part of this series of blog entries. However, if you are on a budget of either time or money, or both perhaps, and you can only do one cruise in New Zealand, then personally I recommend that you do the Doubtful Sound cruise. Not only do you get to cruise through truly magnificent scenery, you actually get two cruises and a coach trip through the mountains, as there is no direct, public road access to the ferry at Doubtful Sound, so you start from Manapouri, take a ferry across Lake Manapouri, get a bus over some absolutely amazing mountain scenery and then descend to Doubtful Sound and to the ferry terminal there.

The day didn’t start very bright, it was cloudy and gray, but the forecast was not terrible, so we were hopeful. We got to the ferry terminal on Lake Manapouri nice and early, and boarded in good time. Off we set across the lake and reached the other side in about an hour, where we were put onto a bus, with a driver with a great sense of humour, and off we set up over the mountains. the weather had started to clear as we drove up steep and narrow gravel roads, with sheer precipices to the side. along the way we were informed that this part of New Zealand gets more rain than the Amazonian Rain Forest, and it rains on over 200 days of the year. Makes England sound pretty much like a desert! Up over the hills we went, amongst the clouds hugging the valleys and then we slowly descended down to the boat that would take us along Doubtful Sound. By now the sun was breaking up the clouds, and the scenery was being bathed in that wonderful bright light.

Doubtful Sound is really a fjord, in that it was created through glaciation and is extremely deep (421m) and extremely long (40km), making for a truly amazing trip. As you proceed along it, you are treated to the most dramatic hanging valleys, if it has been raining recently there are numerous waterfalls that drain into the sound from immense heights, there are feeder valleys and sounds, which you visit, one where they turn off the engine and ask everyone to be quiet, so that you can just hear the rustling of the water, the trees and birds, a really magical experience. The cruise goes right out to the sea, when sealions bask on the rocks and where the headlands are the most westerly point of South Island. The weather could not have been better for our trip and we gently sailed first up the Sound out to the Tasman Sea and then turned around and sailed down the other side of the fjord amongst the dramatic pinnacles and waterfalls, the beautiful trees and the clear, calm waters.

On returning to the dock, we again hopped onto the bus, drove back over the mountains, back to the ferry on Lake Manapouri and then across that lake back to Manapouri itself. With 200 or more days of cloud and rain a year, we counted ourselves very lucky to have been able to visit this magical place on a beautifully clear and sunny day. Definitely a highlight not just of our time here in New Zealand but of my entire life.

Why is it called Doubtful Sound? Because Captain Cook as he circumnavigated New Zealand thought the entrance to the sound looked unsuitable for a landing and uninteresting, and from the sea, it does look quite bland. It is not obvious that the entrance goes anywhere, so the redoubtable Captain Cook sailed on, missing out on seeing one of the most incredible landscapes in the world.

Once back at Manapouri we returned to the campsite, ready to set off on a day’s driving on Christmas Day ready to get to a campsite to head for that other signature cruise of New Zealand, the cruise up Milford Sound.

More on that next time.

Cheers