South Island Pong: Part II

B-3. B-3. Again, folks, in Milford Bingo, if you can't cover the number called, you must remove an article of clothing, and pay $100. Okay, here's come the next numb....wait a second...you two in the back! Yeah, you two, with the broken down station wagon! You still have your clothes on and all of your money! You knew the rules, now strip down and pay up! Get 'em! Hahahahaha!!!!

This is how the story would start if our evening at Milford Sound had taken an absurdly horrific turn for the worst. But we were pretty wiped out, and bingo didn't start for a while, so we decided to head back to our campsite (or very expensive piece of worn astro turf surrounded by 19 similar pieces of turf) and head to bed so we could make it up bright and early for a sunrise breakfast. Even in the Southern Hemisphere, the air gets cooler at night, and the merciless cold we felt moving in as we headed for our campsite had reached it's most bitter right as we were preparing our tea and regular morning feast of yogurt, stone fruit and muesli. Further, because the sound sits in a valley surrounded by high peaks, accessed by a tunnel that by most safety standards shouldn't exist, the warmth of the sun was a long ways off. Fortunately, our hands kept enough feeling for us to snap about eight hundred pictures as the first light hit Mitre Peak.

Eventually, the time was nigh to face our fears and tackle the uphill side of the tunnel (Smaug doesn't care for inclines). Despite some clanks, clunks, smells and rumbles, and car eating keas, we made the trip back to Te Anau without incident.

We were quickly smitten with the area and really wanted to spend some more time exploring. We learned in one of our handy guidebooks about a nice-sounding place to stay in Manapouri, a small community just a few minutes south of Te Anau. We gave them a ring and were thrilled to find out that they had a cabin with a private kitchen, pot-belly stove, deck, grill and views of Lake Manapouri and the Kepler Mountains, all for just a few dollars more than we paid for a 8 x 5 piece of rotten turf the night before (we're over it, we promise). So we picked up some steaks and veggies, headed to our new friend Jimmy's place, made a fire, watched another magnificent sunset from our deck, enjoyed our 1100th bottle of excellent New Zealand wine with a delicious meal and a few hours later, one of us turned 28!

Knowing how sad we would be to leave, and how much we'd rather stick around for a little longer, one of the property horses came to our window and woke us up just in time to track down Jimmy and see if we could stay put for another night. Although he had already booked the cabin, he moved his booking to a different cabin, and then gave us ours for a discount. Folks in New Zealand are inexplicably generous and kind.

Over the last few days, we'd been hatching schemes to check out some different hikes in the area. Fortunately for us, an unfettered sun had been shining on Southland for the last few days. Unfortunately, the Fiordlands receive more rainfall than any other region in New Zealand, and this trend was forecast to continue by the next day, so we had to act quick. We decided to head back up to the Eglinton Valley to knock out a portion of the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks. We didn't get to do the whole thing, but the portion we covered was still notably Great.

We would have loved to spend a month in this area. Three of the nine great walks are in the Fiordlands, along with dozens of other trails that we could probably spend a year exploring, but the weather was about to turn against us. And not simply for the next few days. We'd been doing a fair amount of camping since we left Fox Glacier, and when you sleep outside regularly, you start to notice every degree of temperature change. This is especially true in New Zealand, where they measure temperature in Centigrade, which is nine-fifths colder than Fahrenheit! Also, few places exist in the world that are closer to Antarctica than southern New Zealand. Winter was moving in (and regrettably, still is) and we were, for maybe the second or third time since we arrived, feeling that some planning was in order.

The options south were pretty slim, so we decided the time may have come for us to make our great migration. We decided we'd start off by heading back to Oamaru, where a sure-to-be swinging jazz festival was heading to town for the weekend. Well, that part of the journey is embarrassingly boring, as due to our own exhaustion and laziness (and slightly due to the fact that the Victorian District isn't exactly the French Quarter), we managed to pass the whole weekend without making it to any of the groovy jams, with the exception of a young teenage busker belting out the Lord of the Rings score on tenor sax, who we were more than pleased to help out by making a donation to his New Saxophone Phund.

JAM - The original jam band

But we weren't quite ready to say farewell to the far south yet. A few more barren, remote locations remained unexplored and beckoning us to tempt the fate of our sickly vehicle. And the first of those destinations was that geographical formation which twice in the last two weeks had pushed Smaug to its breaking point...a peninsula. The Otago Peninsula!