Adventures

We spent the night of Tuesday 25 February at one of the simple campsites off the road down to Milford Sound run by the Department of Conservation. The only facility was a toilet. The site was long and thin - just a strip of rough grass lying between a wide gravel bed across which flowed a shallow creek and the forest - and also popular so that by the time we got there the only space left was at the far end. I knew that I would not be walking to that toilet, aided only by starlight, once night fell.
The majority of our fellow campers were much younger,, and using tents or sleeping in the backs of their cars. Compared to that sort of camping, in Tim we were travelling in luxury. And we were the last to turn in; our companions, after having stood outside and cleaned their teeth at length ( they may be unable to have more than a flannel wash - rubbing their armpits with a cloth while keeping their T-shirts on - but I have noticed that backpackers are fastidious with their teeth), having climbed into their cars or tents as soon as it got dark.

We planned to undertake on Wednesday another, more demanding, walk that also starts from the Milford road; the walk to Gertrude's Saddle. This walk might prove to be the most adventurous of our holiday.
However,  before getting to our walk, let me tell you about some other adventures we've had - at least they felt adventurous to us.

There was the scree walking in the Kaikoura mountains, of course, and crossing rivers using bouncing swing bridges, which will only support the weight of one person, when we walked the Catlins River Track.

After leaving a note on the windscreen so that you would discover what had happened to us if we never returned, we crawled, without a guide, through underground limestone caves near Cifden while travelling from Invercargill to Manapouri/Doubtful Sound.

And then there was the journey along 30 kilometres of very corrugated, unsurfaced road - which also had 9 fords - to do a walk in the Mt. Aspiring National Park but, all in good time, I'll tell you more about that later.

P.S. I suppose I ought to own up to the fact that we didn't actually have the courage to stay in the caves for the 40 minutes it would have taken to crawl through them all. When it became necessary to lower ourselves down a hole between boulders we decided we'd been brave enough.