One more week in the sunshine

So after the excitement of Queenstown, it was time to say goodbye to Al and continue my anti-clockwise circuit of the South Island. Initially I'd planned to mostly use up the free time with the Around the Mountains cycle route but I was just too curious about the parts we'd never seen on the previous trip, so instead I drove slowly on empty roads from Te Anau back down through Manaoupori and then on the Scenic Highway route towards Invercargill through the bottom of Fiordland National Park. It was scorchingly hot and sunny, cycling would have reduced me to a crisp even with Factor 50. The rural road to Clifden was very pleasant, mostly through sheep paddocks and farmland reminiscent of Hampshire or Dorset.

All of the settlements here look to be suffering from rural depopulation though - sheep farming just isn't paying any more. Clifden therefore seemed a bit premature as a night stop, and I eventually drove miles down a gravel track to Lake Hauroko, New Zealand's deepest lake and the start of the Tuatapere Hump Track. Had I but known, I could have joined the 90 people running the track in the annual event that takes place there, but I was oblivious to that and instead set my tent up for the night in a lovely grassy two acre paddock with four or five other families a little way back up the road from the lake. The bush beside the lake is extremely dense - well it's the Rowallan Forest Conservation Area - and quite forbidding, a bit like dense Forestry Commission pine forests tend to be in Wales. The campsite however was lovely and I had a perfect night's sleep, waking to the dawn chorus of unfamiliar NZ birds the next morning.

It's something of a surprise that the weather can be so consistently good after all the reports of the wash-out summer in NZ. After breakfast I spend the day exploring the coast on Hwy 99 and experiencing the winds of the Foveaux Straits for the first time. Other than bungey-cording the Trangia to the picnic tables of the scenic lookouts I stopped at, I have no good solution for making coffee in this area. While other tourists stopped to take pictures of the turquoise sea breaking on perfect beaches far below I'd be chasing the lid of the kettle around the parking area or retrieving the frying pan from the bushes.

Evetually I reached Invercargill in the late afternoon and I have to say, it was the antithesis of the place I was expecting to like on first acquaintance. It's so spread out! It sprawls out for twenty minute's drive in all directions when it could in the UK be condensed to a place the size of Horsham in West Sussex. I gave up on it quite rapidly and only returned for a room after an evening at Stirling Point's Oyster Cove restaurant, watching the ebb and flow of visitors to the famous finger post sign in at the end of State Highway 1.