The rain started yesterday evening and continued throughout the night. After breakfast we checked to see if the gondola was running, we could only just see it through the rain and mist and there were still no cars on it. Guess the problems were a little more serious than they first thought.
We headed out to our next destination, Te Anau about 170Km away. The rain continued, heavy at times, with the cloud lower than the top of the hills. As we drove along the edge of Lake Wakatipu we saw clouds of black smoke rising from the water. Closer viewing showed that it was an old steamboat, the TSS Earnslaw. We were a little confused as this particular boat was meant to be doing trips out of Quenstown and shouldn’t be this far down the lake. We stopped off in Kingston as there is a working steam train there. As we pulled into the station area there were cars everywhere and even someone riding a penny farthing bike. Many of the people were in costumes from the early 1900s. We sat in the car (it was still bucketing it down) and watched as the steam ship came into dock, it too was crowded with people in period costume. After the ship had docked the steam train arrived to meet it. We spoke to one of the people in the crowd and found out that this year is the 100th anniversary of the launching of the steamship, and the first time it had visited Kingston in 20 years.
TSS Earnslaw
We continued on to destination through the rain, sustained by a coffee and other produce from the local bakery. We promised our selves at the start of this vacation that we would lay off the “goodies”, but we decided the bad weather provided extenuating circumstances!
Towards midday the rain started to ease up and the sky got brighter, by the time we got to the motel the sun was shining and it was dry. We took a walk into the town to look around, and we also checked out the Milford Sound road situation. The road opened at 1PM, but would close again at 5PM and reopen tomorrow at 10AM. This didn’t work too well for our 945AM boat cruise. We managed to change the cruise to a 1245 departure, so that means no 6AM start.
We also wandered round a conservation type park that had many native NZ birds that were unable to be released back into the wild.
Murphy didn’t totally desert us today, yet again there were no cooking facilities in this motel. We had some beef we bought yesterday and a packet of rice which Lyn managed to turn into a very passable stir fry, all cooked in the microwave.