I was up at 6:20 and headed straight out. Nowhere was open to buy breakfast. I met Chris at the office and we booked the $230 day trip. We got a coffee from the hotel opposite and then took the busy. There was a considerable drive to get there and it felt like a very touristy thing to do. For some reason, the driver's announcements made it clear that he was obsessed with eels. It was good to have some entertainment though.
The trip there consisted of two coaches, a boat across a lake and then another coach which drove us down a stretch of road unconnected to the rest of the road system. For anyone interested, it has a 1/5 gradient and was built as part of the dam project that it turned out that we were going to see. Not that either of us knew this at the time.
At the end of this road was Doubtful Sound. We got another boat, this time a pretty huge and modern one. It was pretty empty because of it being Winter. The scenery was immediately wonderful. It was of a huge scale. There were seals (again) and, if you believed what the captain said, tiny penguins. We had really good packed lunches included in the deal. I found myself running between the various floors desperately trying to get a photo that captured something about the place, but found it totally impossible. At the end of the Sound, we headed out into the sea for a bit to take a look at the entrance to the sound and then started to head back to our starting point. There were numerous parts that were a bit more special than most, and in what was probably the best, the driver turned off the engines and we sat there floating more a few moments in silence. It felt superbly remote and unspoiled. It was definitely the highlight of the day. It was hard to fight the urge to take some more photos here rather than to just try to take it all in. Somehow we managed!
The coach back took a different route, via a power station powered by water from a dam. We were given some impressive facts about the place like how it generated enough Electricity to power Wellington. I asked whether if there were more places where these dams could be built, and if so, whether more cities could be powered this way. Unfortunately it turned out the guy was unable to comprehend any questions or doing anything except regurgitate his small list of facts. I took instead to occasionally ask him if there was somewhere I could buy a bacon sandwich as we went to different places. It only took me doing this a few times for him to get really annoyed. In some way, it felt like a minor victory, against something.
Back at Queenstown we got Jim to meet us and we went to Flame to get some more of their ribs, having tried them as part of the mixed grill previously. The racks we got were huge, with just a few token potatoes and nothing else resembling veg. We had coke floats on the side. Even the meat sweats could not tame the pleasure. We considered going to Cardrona the next day where the skiiing is suppoosed to be great. But we would have to get up stupidly early and we were set on having a big night the next day.
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