Going north

So here I am sitting in the library in Nelson at the top of South Island where there is free Wi-Fi......

With the washing done and dried in the Invercargill campsite on Sunday night (I made sure that I polished the tumble dryer before I left so as to avoid incurring Angela's wrath), we headed north.
Before long, while still travelling through rolling green hills with grazing cattle and sheep, the mountains of Fiordland could be seen ahead.

It seems that the mountains of NZ are still being pushed up by the movement of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates at the rate of 20 millimetres each year (roughly the same rate as our toes and fingernails grow).  But they are being eroded by the same amount.
I was told that if it it were not not for the erosion there would would be mountains here 20 kilometres high.

On the  south western coast is the wilderness of Fiordland - mountains, lakes and fiords created by glaciers, and forests, most of which landscape is inaccessible to the average explorer.
Milford Sound is the most famous and most visited of the fiords but Doubtful Sound is deeper, longer and more peaceful, which is why we chose to take a boat trip on it.
As for the name:-
'Doubtful' is said to come from the fact that when Captain James Cook first sailed along the coast and saw the entrance to it he decided against sailing into the fiord because the wind blowing down it off the Tasman Sea was so strong that he doubted he would be able to sail out again. Bear in mind that this was in the 18th century and that he was relying upon sails and oarsmen to power his ship.
Use of the word 'Sound'  is said to have been a mistake by the first Europeans to discover the fiords. A sound is a river valley that has become flooded because the land has sunk below sea level but fiords are created by glaciers scouring out steep-sided U-shaped valleys, which then become flooded. A guide book I read commented that 'the mistake can be understood when you realise that these early sailors were English and Welsh' !

So we drove northwards to the small town of Manapouri on the lake of that name and arranged to go to Doubtful Sound the next day, Tuesday.
We then had the rest of the day free and walked the beginning of the Kepler Track, one of NZ's Great Walks which attract hundreds of trampers every year. It takes days to complete each of these walks and there are bunkhouses at various points providing primitive accommodation for hardy walkers. We walked through beautiful forest (said to have been used for the River Anduin scenes during the filming of The Lord of the Rings) to Moturau, the first hut/bunkhouse. This is one of the larger ones, and even has showers and flushing toilets during the summer months.