It gets harder to find suitable presents for your partner as you get older, so this year my wife and I decided to give each other an unforgettable experience.
We are both interested in nature, so we chose to visit Fiordland National Park in the south west of New Zealand.
The National Park is internationally recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Its Maori name is Te Wahipounamu (Place of the Greenstone).
The Park covers 1.2 million hectares of mountain, lake, fiord and rainforest environments. It is home to glaciers, alpine ranges and unique flora and fauna surviving since New Zealand was part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland.
New Zealand is one of only a few places on the planet where you can see the spectacular sight of glacier-carved fiords.
Early Maori visited Fiordland for hunting, fishing and gathering takiwai (New Zealand jade). Later, European sealers and whalers took shelter in the fiords and built a handful of small settlements. But the wild topography, steepness of the terrain, isolation, and the inclement weather, including about six metres of annual rainfall, deterred permanent settlement.
Fiordland is administered by the NZ Department of Conservation who strictly limit human activities to preserve the pristine environment.
The park is mainly wilderness, a jumble of mountains and fiords unchanged by humans. Only one fiord, Milford Sound, is accessible by road, but we had been there some years ago. We chose to visit remote Doubtful Sound, which is three times as big as Milford Sound.
Doubtful Sound was named by Captain James Cook in 1770. He decided if he ventured into the fiord, it would be “doubtful” the HMB Endeavour could sail back out against the prevailing westerly wind.
The Maori name is much more descriptive. They call it Patea – place of silence. Birdsong and cascading waterfalls are the only sounds to break the stillness.
Doubtful Sound stretches 40 kilometres from Deep Cove at the head of the fiord to the Tasman Sea. It is the deepest of New Zealand’s 14 fiords, at 420m and one of the largest, 10 times the size of Milford Sound and much more isolated.
The Sound branches into three arms which provide opportunity for scenic cruise boat passengers to see rugged peaks and explore up-close sheer cliff faces, dense lush rain-forest, thundering waterfalls and find tranquil overnight moorings.
With no road to the fiord, getting to Doubtful Sound is an adventure in itself. It is accessible to visitors by a tour excursion departing from Manapouri.
Having previously booked a tour with Real NZ, we stayed the night in a cabin overlooking Lake Manapouri and joined the trimaran Titiroa, leaving Manapouri at midday and travelling for 45 minutes across lake Manapouri to West Arm.
West Arm houses an underground hydro-electric power station, but tours are not currently available. However, there is a well-equipped information centre.
Next, we travelled by coach 60km along a high and winding gravel road through 671 m high Wilmot Pass to Deep Cove. The road was built to allow large components to be shipped to the power station when during construction
There is no settlement at Deep Cove, which has a permanent population of one, an outdoor education centre and a small fleet of fishing boats which work out at sea in search of cod and rock lobster.
At Deep Cove we boarded Fiordland Navigator for a two-night scenic cruise through the sound as far as the Tasman Sea.
Doubtful Sound is glorious on sunny days and breathtaking on rainy days. We experience both mist, rain and sunshine. After rain, spectacular waterfalls line the fiord’s walls. When fine many of the 40 or so younger travellers took to kayaks to explore the fiord shore line.
Fiordland has abundant wildlife. These include New Zealand’s southernmost population of bottlenose dolphins, local populations of kekeno (New Zealand Fur Seals) and tawaki, (Fiordland Crested Penguin) and possibly a few surviving large ground-dwelling parrots – kakapos.
There may even be moose. Ten moose, a gift from US President Theodore Roosevelt were 10 released in 1905. The NZ government then planned to turn Fiordland into a hunters’ paradise.
Over a few years, moose sightings were reported and photographs occasionally appeared in local newspapers. The last confirmed sighting was in 1952, but there are clues that some moose remain. There have been several unconfirmed sightings. We saw none.
A tour of Doubtful Sound provides an incredible wilderness experience and the bragging right of going where Captain Cook feared to go.
