Doubtful Sound

Apologies in advance for the length of this entry... The trek to the summit of Avalanche Peak brought on a recurrence of my Premiership career-ending knee injury, or rather the over-ambitiously speedy descent did. It took me three days to come to terms with the fact that I would not be able to walk the Milford Trail on this visit. In recompense to myself, I decided to follow the recommendation of a hostel owner in Wanaka to go sea kayaking on Doubtful Sound, the larger, more aloof and less popular sister of Milford.

So it goes that Captain Cook named this Fiord because he didn't think there would be enough wind for his ships to exit if they ventured inside. This 40km fiord (a glaciated valley which reaches the sea) was my home for two days, my companions Adrian the guide, Scott the New Yorker from Fargo, and Debbie the hairdresser from Cornwall with a nephew who went to my school. After an hour of paddling we reached the main body of the Sound, and Adrian stopped us for the first of his many party pieces. He asked us to estimate the height of the near vertical mountain rising out of the water ahead of us. We centred in on 1,500ft, less than half its actual size. Adrian explained that the scale of the fiord baffles every visitor's senses. Suitably awed, we struck off down Hall Arm looking at geological fault lines marked by huge fissures in the cliffs and listening to far off penguins. Adrian used to work for DOC (Department of Conservation) and was a learned and laconic guide, explaining dolphins recent absence from the Sound as a result of the hydroelectric plant at one end, and bringing to life beech trees' 250-year cycle of life and death clinging to sheer granite rock faces.

Towards dusk we camped by a river mouth and feasted on our various one-pot wonders, washed down by wine in a bag and mini-eggs, courtesy of Jesus' death 1983 years previously. After dinner Adrian said he would take us Kiwi-spotting. His attempts at communicating with the deer in the valley earlier had done nothing to dispel us of his deep lack of seriousness, so we headed past the camp toilet and into the rainforest with our expectations suitably tempered. To our advantage, a full moon was up, and our head torches redundant. Male Kiwis are highly territorial and, when we paused a little way into the bush, Adrian positioned us ahead of him and, with a blade of grass, did a passable imitation of the male of the species. We were deathly silent as Adrian supplanted his faux calls with a shuffling of his feet in the style of a Kiwi trampling ferns. A minute or so later, from maybe 15m away, the dark taking its toll on more than one sense, came the sound of ferns and bracken being broken at pace. The noise stopped and after a few seconds a scream arose from low in the bushes 5m in front of me. It was piercing, plaintive, aggressive, and utterly thrilling. This rare nocturnal bird shrieking at me to "ger orf his laaaand" had me grinning and shaking with excitement. We retreated and, true to form, he chased us further, eventually offering us a glimpse of His Kiwiness in the gloom. A Kiwi in a zoo is runty, absurd and pitiful. In the night of the termperate rainforest in Fiordland it is quite majesterial, and worthy of its status as the national emblem.

Dawn the next day was almost as magical, the daylight offering me the chance to try to capture something of the stillness of this place as the mist rose. The marvel for today, apart from the discover of 51 sandfly bites, was a 3,000ft high waterfall, once thought to be thr highest in the world before a Frenchman decided it was a cascading river instead. Battling the tide a flow from the hydro plant, we paddled for 5 hours around an island and back to civilisation once more - in the form of a village of 200 people. A more than adequate substitute for Milford I think.