A Walk in the Woods & a Lakeside Cycle

Wednesday 26 March

We slept well after our big day in Milford Sound - but got up relatively early to join Liz and her walking group friends for an excursion along the first few kilometres of the Kepler Track after the Control Gates. It was a grey day but still beautiful as we walked through the bush, alongside Lake Te Anau. We passed Dock Bay, waited for some stragglers to catch up then after Liz had got our photo on the bridge at Coal Creek we convened on the beach there for a wee snack before turning back to the Control Gates.

By coincidence, we weren’t the only visitors on the walk and it turned out that Lyndsey Oliver (the other interloper) was from Fife and had lived in St Andrews when I was there in the 1980s. Her husband was a geology professor and they lived between the Economics department and the Catholic Chaplaincy on The Scores. They knew Dr Peter McKiernan who taught me Economics and Mo Malek who was one of my Politics tutors - and we both held a similar opinion about PMK ;-) So much to talk about, especially as she & her husband were touring South Island so we shared hints & tips.

Meanwhile Liz had introduced Louis to Jan Kitchen who had studied music at Vic Uni like him, but 25 years earlier.

After lunch at Ditto & a then a siesta we caught up with Fred who ran the POP and Larry (who was really in charge!) then hopped on the Ebikes and cycled round the lakefront for an hour or two - but still no sunshine! I loved the Matariki sculpture along the trail - this one represented Waipunarangi (Electra in Greek) who is the god of rain & other forms of precipitation. Literally translated the name means "water that pools in the sky" and refers to the hydrological cycle - from rain, to mountain streams and lakes, to vapour, to clouds and round again.

On the way home we stopped at the bird sanctuary to watch 2 breeding pairs of takahē with their rather large and less vibrant chicks as they foraged in the long grass and took a drink in the conveniently provided pool. Believed to be extinct in the early half of the 20th century, a breeding pair was discovered near Invercargill in 1948. Under a variety of breeding programmes there are now around 500 takahē - mostly in captive programmes or on protected sanctuary islands.

Dinner in Banjo (delicious chicken roast with loads of veggies including cauliflower cheese) and a not so early night after watching too many episodes of Last One Laughing. It was a chilly night, but judging by the size of the woodpile at this POP, they expect it to get a lot colder for a lot longer!