Stop #11 – Fjordland National Park Cruise
New Zealand’s southwestern corner is home to one New Zealand’s most beautiful and remote regions; Fjordland National Park. To best see this area you need to travel deep into the park via water, land and more water. We took a one night cruise to Doubtful Sound for our visit. Doubtful Sound is one of many fjords extending in from the coast. It’s famous for its size and abundance of towering cliffs, waterfalls and wildlife. We left Manpouri and traveled on our first boat across Lake Manpouri to an area called the West Arm. This took about an hour. This area is known for its hidden dam that supplies power to a large portion of the far south of the island.
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| Fjordland National Park |
There is a road that we traveled by coach bus that was built with the dam connecting that lake to Doubtful Sound. We traveled that road to reach our cruise boat for the remainder of the day, night and next morning. The boat held about 70 and was ideal for touring the sound. A highlight of our cruise was viewing a pod of bottlenose dolphins that call the sound home. The cruise also allowed us to kayak in the sound for portion of the afternoon, allowing us to get close to the shore. The area gets an astounding nine feet of rainfall each year and we experienced some of that in the afternoon and evening. That rainfall is what powers all the waterfalls so we were happy to have that for all our touring the next morning. Traveled back by bus and boat to Manpouri arriving back in town about mid-day. We then traveled south to the Catlins area to the town of Tokanui for the night.
