After Queenstown we headed to Manapouri to do a day cruise out on Doubtful Sound. You may be feeling some deja-vu because Jared and his parents did an overnight cruise into this place already. Well, Jared found a deal online and we figured, "what the heck?" The place was completely different because of the rain anyways, but more on that later.
So if you remember from before, Doubtful Sound is harder to get to than Milford Sound. You need to take a ferry across Lake Manapouri and then drive a gravel road (which was very expensive to build) to Deep Cove, the terminal part of Doubtful Sound. Here is a map to explain myself:
We started at Pearl Harbor and crossed Lake Manapouri, then drove across to the start of Doubtful Sound.
The ferry ride across was nice but there was a bit of rain so you couldn't see very far. We figured this would be awesome for the waterfalls at the fjord so we didn't fret it too much.
Boats on Lake Manapouri
Sun shining down on Mt. Nipple (probably not the real name)
Once on the other side of Lake Manapouri we got off the boat to tour the Manapouri Power Station. This was a very cool place and I'm not particularly into things like that.
View of the power station from the shores of Lake Manapouri
Now it's probably ridiculous that I got the task of describing how this thing works but here goes: Lake Manapouri is 230 m above sea-level, so they dug huge channels below the ground, and as they pass the water from the lake through these and out to sea they generate power. It's not like a typical dam where they block off the flow in a horizontal direction and then generate power that way. This goes in a vertical direction. Can you dig it? Here is a schematic of the whole plant:
That yellow tube is a tunnel dug for vehicles. We drove the bus down there and were 193 m below the surface of Lake Manapouri!
Down in the tunnel (apologize for the blurriness)
Once down there we walked into the power station machine hall, which houses the turbines. Those are the blue things you see in the picture. You only see the top 1/4 of them, the rest is below the floor, churning water like crazy or whatever turbines do.
This picture does not do justice to the fact that this is hundreds of metres below the ground and the walls are solid carved rock.
The whole reason this baby was build (back in the 60's no less) was for an aluminum smelter that runs down near Bluff. Apparently smelting aluminum takes a ton of power. So most of the power generated goes to that, about 15% goes onto the national grid. If they didn't have to power the smelter they could power the whole South Island easily. It was mid-blowing reading about how they first started building the tail-race tunnels (these are the tunnels that send the 'used up' water out to Doubtful Sound). All they had was dynamite, and these tunnels were 10 km long! The project took over 8 million man hours, and sadly claimed the lives of 16 men. When they wanted to build a bigger tunnel in the late 90's to increase capacity, they used a tunnelling machine (similar to the one used to dig through the English Channel). Total cost is hard to report because the 1.35 million figure from back in the '70s would be around 2 billion today. Plus the new tail-race tunnel in the 90's cost another 2 billion. Heaps!
After the power station we got drove down the gravel road that connects Lake Manapouri and Doubtful Sound. By the by, because this road was put through such rough terrain, they estimate it cost $2.50/inch of road! Along the way it was pretty misty, but here are some pics.
First of many waterfalls
The exit of the tail-race tunnel
First sight of Doubtful Sound
We hopped on a boat and hit the fjord. Yes..the early explorers misnamed all the fjords as sounds. Sounds are more V-shaped valleys (like in Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island). They are a flooded river valley. Fjords are U-shaped and are the result of glaciers carving out valleys. But we will forgive them, after all they did circumnavigate the Earth hundreds of years before GPS was invented.
Some of my favourite views in Doubtful Sound were right off the bat, there were 3 peaks rising up out of the water together and were covered in waterfalls:
Because it was raining so hard, there were tons of waterfalls, all over the place. You kind of had to take cover when it really poured, and then run out and snap pictures like crazy once the rain broke. Fjordland is so magical in the rain. At this point I think it's just best to shut up and let the pictures do the talking
This is about where the clouds started to break and we were able to see the tops of the mountains again.
Getting soaked while the boat got close to the base of the waterfalls. There was so much mist!
Until Next Time!
