Fox, Cook, Gold & Te

Today was a bit of a long stretch, as we were aiming to set off early from Franz Josef, and hit Te Anau this evening, as it’s a good launching point to get to Milford Sound early the next morning. Sounds like a good plan except for the fact that it’s somewhere in the order of 500 Km and I really didn’t want to miss any of the great scenery in between. We therefore hit the trail early on and were rewarded straight away with some truly stunning sights.

First off we stopped to take some snaps of the mist rising off a stream with the foothills of the latest range behind it…

really lovely stuff, but it wasn’t long before we hit the Fox Glacier, neighbour to the one at Franz Josef, and although we weren’t going up to see this one, the mountain that powers it, the famous Mt. Cook was clearly visible and there is a great lake called Lake Matheson that gives a stunning panoramic mirror view of the whole scene…

After being overly friendly and cheerfully annoying everyone, we set back off heading towards Haast – a mammoth stretch down the West Coast through some really wild ‘hills’ with Knights Point only having connected up the roads from the south around 1963. From there we headed inland towards the Haast Pass and into Mt. Aspiring National Park. This whole area being a shielded valley that stretched for miles is wine country, and whilst being a bit boring on the scenery side of things yielded vineyard after vineyard, right up until we hit Lake Wanaka and then Lake Hawea, a beautiful clear lake with power boaters doing laps on it!

After stopping for a brief picnic, we carried on down through Cromwell, where I simply couldn’t resist trying my hand at panning for gold in the canyon!

Apparently there was a gold mine here, and allegedly people actually find gold flakes in the silt, but all I found was a lot of quartz. All very pretty, but I wasn’t going to be able to retire :(

Onwards then to Arrowtown and through Queenstown to Lake Wakatipu, this place looked more Med than N.Z.!

It wasn’t long before we had Te Anau in our sights, a really nice little town with real facilities set besides Lake Te Anau, the largest lake in the South Island, so we found our lodgings for the night, went out for some nosh and then crashed out ready to get up early to go visit Milford Sound, can’t wait!