"Back to "civilisation"

 

Back in Queenstown and only 12 hours until I head home – yippee! Thursday afternoon after the walk we did a 5:15pm cruise on Milford Sound – was brilliant. Incredibly windy but otherwise magnificent. Chips and veggie spring rolls included. A number of times the large boat went right up to the sheer granite walls of the fiord. Impossibly passive mountains, wheeling, cawing gulls, and, to top it off, a pod of dolphins accompanied us for a while at the end. Magical. Dinner at café again (awful quinoa and falafel salad). Ended up with 3 wonderful bunk mates in the dorm room – Kim, a young nurse from Utah, originally Pittsburgh and Jürgen and Birgit from near Frankfurt – he a forester and she a part-time GP. Talked until almost 11pm about a variety of things, including, of course, Herr Präsident Trumpf. A worldwide lament. Had a good night’s sleep on a nice single bed. Breakfast, packed up and headed off – gave Kim a lift to the Lake Marian track then headed on to Queenstown, via Lumsden. Paid my respects to my greatgrandparents at their resting place there – Steve was touched to think that they had come all the way from so close to where he has lived almost all of his life – to make a new life here at the other end of the world. We then followed my GPS on the wrong road out of town for 20km, not realising that the phone had frozen and the map wasn’t moving! Turned around and heading back the right way. We’d just made it to Te Anau earlier in the day from Milford Sound with the very last drop of petrol in the tank. Ended up this evening at Frankton Motor Camp – quite run down, looks like a place for the less fortunate. Poverty in New Zealand might not be as ugly as in other parts of the world, but it’s still there, never too far away. A rowdy group in the kitchen/common room – German backpackers and some locals. All quite jarring after the gentle beauty of the Track. Left us pining for the fiords! It’s such a contrast to the enchanted world we’ve been in. An average night’s sleep in the tent – had been dismantled by customs on the way in to New Zealand, so was tricky getting it properly set up. Head below feet and sideways slope! Knees hurt! Never mind, I’ve survived. Morning routine, now heading out.