I arrived in Te Anau in the early afternoon. Looking for something to do with the rest of the day I found out that there's not a lot you can do in Te Anau in half a day. Te Anau is mostly a starting point for day and multi-day trips to Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound. But you can go on a trip to the Te Anau Glowworm Caves. They are located on the shores of Lake Te Anau and only accessible by boat. It's a fairly popular trip, but there were still some tickets available for one of the afternoon tours, so I bought one.
The boat trip was a bit crowded, since the tour was fully booked (as most of them seem to be). There is outside standing room on top of the ship and with warm weather, clear blue skies, fairly calm water and just a small bit of wind, many people first went up there. Then there was some advice from the crew that it will be wet up there during the trip. Those on top of the boat didn't mind at first, until told that this wouldn't mean little sprays of water, but 'very' wet. Some took that serious and went below deck, but most stayed outside.
And came back in about three minutes later, completely soaked.
The half-hour trip was nice (if you were dry or didn't mind being wet), but after that, the experience deteriorated. The whole thing suffered strongly from being hyped too much and being unable to live up to the image. Since not everyone can enter the cave at the same time, you get split up in smaller groups and while the first groups go to the cave, you get to stay in a darkened room and watch a video about the cave, telling you what you are going to see and how exciting it is. I don't know about the effect on other tourists, but I am really annoyed by stuff like that. I came here to see the cave, not a video about the cave. I can do that anywhere else. And I hate to be told how much I'm going to enjoy it, because that's something I prefer to decide by myself. And giving a glossy presentation, right before you see the reality of it, makes people (or at least me) very aware of how boring it is in real life. Not a very smart move. I understand the need of keeping people occupied while the rest is in the cave, but there are better ways. (An obvious example was the underwater observatory in Milford Sound the next day. The situation was similar. You couldn't get all the people into the observatory the same time. And they also showed a video. But this video was about the construction of the observatory, why it was built, what was special about this location. So what the video gave was additional information that helped to appreciate the place, but it didn't tell you what you were about to see. In addition, this was a lit room, so you could also wander around, look at some information posters (which also gave background information), browse some books or talk to the guide. This environment gave the impression that they did their best to give people something to do to make the unavoidable waiting time as pleasant as possible, while the impression at the glowworm caves gave me the feeling of being shepherded and forced to sit through some 'corporate experience' movie.)
After a while it was time to go to the cave. One of the interesting bits is that you move through parts of the cave in a boat. Sounds fine. So you follow the guide, enter a boat (a punt for about a dozen people), settle down, waiting for the exciting experience, the guide pulls the boat along a chain for about twenty meters - and the boat trip is over and you leave the boat on the next landing. And you wonder whether this is supposed to be it. Then you follow the guide (who wields a flashlight) along some well constructed walkways and get the feeling that there could easily have been twenty additional meters of these walkways and that the boat trip was only left in there for the sake of having a boat trip. You get a quick look at the bottom of a small waterfall, but little to see of anything else, since the tour guide keeps the light pointed strictly on the way (with some short pans over the ceiling and the water, but too focused to get any impression at all - it's just a bright dot on some water surface, nothing that gives you a coherent picture). There's no real need for darkness, since we're not in the glowworm part yet. Then we get to the end of the walkway and we have to wait for the second punt to come back. It takes a couple of minutes in which we stand around and look at nothing. The tour guides keeps shining his torch on some spot on the water. Then the other group comes in and once it's close enough, the tour guide flips the switch and turns on the light in the cave, which, of course, has electric lighting. (Which leaves the distinct feeling that all the business with the flashlights is just mainly an act to give an 'exploration' feeling than a necessity.) This would be a good chance to have a look at the cave, but we need to let the other group leave the boat and enter it ourselves, so there's only little chance for cave viewing. Once we're in the boat the light is turned off again. Now the guide pulls the punt along some more chains around some bent in the river and into another cave (let's be generous and assume this is about a fifty meter trip), which actually contains glowworms. The tour guide pulls the punt back and forth a few times and turns it around a bit (to be fair, it's probably that everyone gets a good view, but by the time I was cynical enough to assume that it was just that it seemed like a longer distance than it actually was) and then it was time to go back again.
All in all it felt like a decent little attraction that someone tried to 'develop' into an 'experience'. As far as the original attraction went, it was about as exciting as Kaiwiti cave. Which is much more low key and was a much better experience.
But it's a nice boat trip across Lake Te Anau, so all in all it's not that bad, if you shift the emphasis a bit and consider it a boat trip with a slight detour instead of a cave trip which just happens to be accessible by boat.
On the way back it was supposedly less wet on the top of the boat, since the wind was in the right direction. While formally true, it was about the difference between standing in a shower or jumping into a pool. It takes marginally longer to get wet in a shower, but after a minute it doesn't make much difference. Still, this time I was standing on the outside, getting soaking wet and enjoying it (knowing that I would be able to get to my hotel room and a hot shower within five minutes after the trip).
I wasn't quite sure on whether the plans for the next day would work out, but in they end, it was spectacular.
It's a bit of a drive to Milford Sound (at least it seemed to me like that when I booked the trip - by the time I got there, I had driven longer detours for much less plausible reasons) and it's a cul-de-sac, so I had decided quite early that I'd leave my car in Te Anau and do an organized tour from there. But I also didn't fancy to take the scenic route twice, so I decided to take a fly-in / cruise / coach-out tour. But this time it was not just the usual problem of booking the flight (they don't fly for just one person and most people don't pre-book for sightseeing flights, so it's often only an hour before the flight when I know whether it's going to happen), but also the additional problem of bad weather. The flight to Milford Sound passes over a mountain range and the weather conditions were bad. Three days earlier a helicopter going from Te Anau to Milford Sound didn't arrive at its destination and the next two days they weren't even able to do search and rescue flights, much less sightseeing trips. So I was quite lucky when not only three more passengers showed up (who only went for the sightseeing flight, not for the cruise, but that was enough for the flight to happen), but also the weather had cleared up sufficiently for the flight. (Which wouldn't hold for long. The next couple of days the weather was once again too bad for search operations and the helicopter remained lost.)
The flight was fine, but since most of it consisted of trying to pick a flight path between the clouds and the mountains, it didn't provide many photo opportunities.
Milford Sound is fairly impressive, even with cloudy weather and a bit of a drizzle, which is a good thing since that's what the weather is like most of the time. To quote a guidebook "Milford is serene, but don't expect blue skies. Milford is synonymous with rain." So if Milford Sound wouldn't be an interesting place in the rain, it wouldn't be much of a tourist attraction at all. Some bits are only there during the rain (or shortly thereafter). Only two or three of the waterfalls in that area are permanent, the others aren't connected to any reservoir, so they're only there while it rains and a couple of hours after that. On a windy day, some of the waterfalls don't quite seem to make it to the ground. didn't even the same route,
But halfway through the tour the clouds started to move away and the sun was coming up, revealing quite a different sight of Milford Sound.
The seals relaxed on the rocks. The fish in the underwater observatory didn't care much.
The way back to Te Anau also turned out to be better than expected. I had assumed that I'd go on one of the big busses, which, having stopped at the sightseeing points on the way in, would rush back to Te Anau. It turned out that the company I was traveling with was usually doing tours for small groups and nobody had booked a coach-in / cruise / coach-out trip that day and the people who flew in with me continued on the plane, so I had a driver waiting for me who came with a minibus all the way from Te Anau just to pick me up and drive me back. And since I hadn't seen that route on the way in (and the weather was fine), she didn't mind stopping on all the usual sightseeing points. Great.
The private tour lasted only for half an hour or so. At the next stop we met one of the big busses and one of the tourists had forgotten a camera on the ship. Since it was easier for us to drive him back in the mini-bus, we took him on board and drove back to Milford Sound. We didn't find the camera, so we turned around again and caught up with the big bus on the next stop. (It later turned out that the camera was in some jacket pocket back on the bus.) We continued and a couple of miles later we encountered another big bus, which had problems with its radiator. The area is pretty far from any towns and surrounded by mountains, so there's no chance calling for help with a mobile phone. But there's an emergency satellite phone near a big tunnel on the road, so we were asked to drive ahead and call for assistance and a tow truck, while the bus driver would try to drive on slowly.
The parking place next to the tunnel is worked by a kea, a mountain parrot. Basically it is an avian extortion scheme, the kea will sit on cars until it gets fed, or it will jump onto the hood of the car and rip of the windshield wipers. Supposedly they "often supplement their traditional diet of bugs and berries with tasty windscreen rubber", but the m.o. suggests otherwise. Like sitting on the roof of the car for convenient feeding and then, as the driver got into the car and closed the door without feeding the bird, it jumped on the hood and started going for the windscreen wiper.
The satellite phone can only be used to call an emergency service, which in turn called the bus company, which in turn called some tow service and informed the emergency service that the problem was taken care of and they called back on the emergency phone to let us know. In the meantime the defective bus had made its way slowly, to avoid overheating the motor, to our position, since this was a reasonably large parking lot and a better place to wait than standing at the roadside. Since our mini bus was empty (except for the driver and me), we were asked to take as many passengers as possible with us, so they wouldn't have to wait in the other bus. So a private tour became a fully booked tour, but we still stopped at any interesting viewpoint, which was also a plus for the other passengers, since they had seen most of them in the morning when it was still overcast. And the minibus could stop in some places were the big bus couldn't.
The day ended with a beautiful sunset over Lake Te Anau.
Give how dreadful the day could have been, I had a very lucky day.
