New Zealand

We slept well last night. We got up around 9:00 am and got to the dining room around 9:45 am. We enjoyed a very nice breakfast, over which we discussed plans for the day.

We decided that we would try to go to Milford Sound today. The best option was to charter a helicopter, so we made a tentative booking for the afternoon. The weather forecast for Milford Sound suggested a strong chance of rain, so the hotel concierge suggested that we make a final call just after lunch. In the meantime, we headed back to our room and relaxed for a while.

At about 2:30 pm, the concierge called us and advised that the weather didn’t look great, so we decided to push the helicopter plan to tomorrow. We now had the afternoon free, so we got in the car and headed toward Glenorchy, intending to walk around the town. But we ended up driving through the town and about 30km up a dirt road (with plenty of creek crossings that were a bit of a challenge in our Corolla!) until we ran out of road at a place called Chinaman’s Bluff. We hopped out of the car and explored a little of the walking trail that started at the end of the road. Some people we spoke to told us that it would take us a few days to walk the trail. Needless to say, that wasn’t going to happen! But we did poke along the start of the trail to get a nice view of Dart River and surrounds.

On the drive back we spotted a couple of the “locals”, who apparently summed us up pretty quickly and didn’t like what they saw!

It turned out that the road we had travelled down took us past some of the locations used in the Lord Of The Rings movies. We probably wouldn’t have bothered to stop at any of them but at one of them there were quite a few cars and a tour bus parked, with plenty of people wandering around and taking photos. We decided that we should stop too and take some photos, even though we didn’t really know what we were looking at! (We spoke to the tour guide in charge of the bus and he told us that we were at the setting for Lothlórien, the “holy grail” site to visit for Lord Of The Rings fans. Who knew!?)

While we were getting set up to take some photos, we heard someone call out our names. It turned out that a couple we knew from Carey (whose twins were in Christie’s year) had also stopped in the same out-of-the-way place in the middle of nowhere! We had a good chat with them before taking a few more photos and hopping back in the car.

We got back to Blanket Bay around 6:15 pm. We stopped again on the hotel’s private road to grab a few more photos before heading back inside to change for dinner.

After quickly getting changed for dinner, we headed to the dining room. We opted to sit outside in the evening sun and enjoy the relative warmth.

We had a magnificent dinner, taking in the warmth of the sun and the incredible view.

After dinner we went for a short stroll around the property before returning to our room for the evening.

We were told that tomorrow should be a beautiful day here, so we are hopeful that this will also be the case on the west coast of the island so we can get to Milford Sound. But, for now, it’s off to bed after a fun day.