Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Te Anau: Gateway to Fiordland

Laura (on the way to Fiordland, known for its extremely high annual rainfall): "Goodbye sunshine! See you in a couple of days."
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We drove to Te Anau, pronounced variously as "tyownow," "teeanuh" and "tay ah na ooh," and we chose the worst accommodations so far on this trip. And even that wasn't that bad: a room of six bunks in a New Zealand hostel, shared with friendly backpackers of all ages and from all sorts of countries.

Look for a post in the coming days about New Zealand's excellent hostel system and the various tiers of prices--and correlating degrees of privacy--that you can choose from when you stay at these facilities.

Tomorrow, we have a big trip ahead of us: an excursion to Doubtful Sound, one of Fiordland's most famous and most remote fiords. The journey will be fairly expensive, will involve three separate modes of transportation, and it will end up being more than worth every penny and every ounce of effort we put into getting there. Come back tomorrow for that post!

In the meantime, we need to fuel up for a big day, so we walked over to Te Anau's best restaurant, the Redcliff Cafe. After a couple of beers, a delicious dinner of rack of lamb, and a stroll by the lake, we went to bed early.




Redcliff Cafe
12 Mokonui Street
Te Anau, Southland 9600
Phone: 03 249 7431

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