I didn’t blog yesterday out of extreme frustration, which I’ll get to later. We had a lovely day yesterday. We drove about an hour and a quarter north to the beautiful lake town of Wanaka (accent on the first syllable). We got some excellent advice at the information office there. The extremely patient and helpful Hil told us the best hiking trail, she recommended a water taxi ride on the lake,and she even made some calls to help confirm why we should not plan a trip to Dunedin, a coastal city about three and a half hours away.
We hiked along the Clutha River for an hour or so, then drove to the marina. That’s where we got on a small boat with a twin-engine outboard motor for the half-hour ride up to Mou Waho island. We saw native flightless birds, the Buff Weka. We also hiked to up to a lookout atop a big hill, which gave us a view of a lake on this island in the lake. Gorgeous! I apologize for not posting any pictures of these adventures, but the wi-fi here is so lame; it would take all night to load.
We got back to Queenstown late in the afternoon, giving me plenty of time to make more frustrating phone calls to the people supposedly getting me reunited with my lost luggage. The airline baggage people assured me the bag had arrived at the airport on a flight that landed at 3:30 that afternoon. So why wasn’t it at my hotel? I went to the airport looking for it. All the Virgin Australia people had already gone home for the night after their last flight left a few hours before. Nobody else at the airport could help me. Nobody I reached on the phone could help, either. When I told all this to Vanessa, who runs this motel with her brother Hartley and their parents, she was so incensed that she promised to make it her mission to get my bag back. I was even more pissed because the next day we were heading out at 7 a.m. for an all-day excursion to Milford Sound.
“You go enjoy Milford Sound,” Vanessa instructed me. “Don’t worry about your luggage. I promise you I’ll either have your luggage or a thousand-dollar gift card from Virgin waiting for you when you get back.” She even loaned me one of her dad’s jackets; knowing I’d need one at Milford Sound.
I slept well, knowing Vanessa was on the case.
Just after 7 this morning, we were lining up to board a nice bus for the trip to Milford Sound, on the west coast of the South Island. It’s one of the places everyone who comes here goes to see—probably the most famous destination in New Zealand. We saw about a dozen other tour buses along the five-plus hour drive there. We had a wonderful driver/guide, Eric. He was funny and knowledgeable and informative; he made the time fly even if the bus couldn’t.
Milford Sound isn’t actually a sound; those are made by rivers, Eric said. Milford Sound is a fjord because it was made by a glacier, and it’s one of the five fjords in Fjordlands National Park. So how did it get misnamed? Turns out the first White explorer to find it named it for his hometown in Wales, Milford Haven. But Captain Cook, perhaps the best-known and most prolific explorer of the South Pacific, apparently believed only he should get to name places. So he changed Milford Haven to Milford Sound. For the record, the Maori people who lived here for millennia before any white people showed up, have always called it Piopiotahi
By any name, it’s one of wettest places on earth. Milford Sound gets 252 inches of rain a year. And it’s much cooler there than on the other side of the mountains that form the fjord’s eastern border. It wasn’t raining hard on our boat ride, just enough to make the jacket necessary. Thank you, Vanessa! The boat ride through the Fjord to the mouth of the Tasman Sea lasted about an hour and 45 minutes. We saw fur seals and lots of great waterfalls. It was similar to what you see sailing up Alaska’s inside passage.
While on the ride home, at about 5:15 p.m. local time, my cell phone range. It was a representative of Virgin Australia and the Queenstown Airport. She had my bag, was about to clear it through customs, and was I still at the same hotel? She would send it right over to the hotel. I called the hotel to give them a head’s up. Vanessa’s mom was thrilled to get the news. She told me Vanessa had called people at the airport today and “kicked butt.” I don’t doubt it.
The bus dropped us off where it had picked us up, in the middle of town. We got gelato for dinner (!) and walked back to our room, where my luggage was waiting. I almost excited about wearing different clothes tomorrow. It’s the little things, am I right?