We’re on the move again today, heading to Dunedin via Invercargill.

We had a beautiful view of the Fiordland mountains as we drove out of town. The only time in our weeklong stay here that the clouds rose enough to present them in the morning glow of sunshine, with a rainbow thrown in for effect!

Our purpose for going through Invercargill was to see the display of artifacts from the life of Burt Munro which are housed, along with a great collection of motorcycles and other vehicles, at a fantastic hardware store, E. Hayes & Sons Hardware. A lifelong resident of Invercargill, his passion for motorcycle racing led to his multiple trips to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to compete for world speed records, which he achieved in 1967.

The Munro Special, a 1920 Indian Scout motorcycle that he bought in 1920, was the vehicle he set a world speed record on! He had spent decades modifying the motorcycle, making his own tools and parts!

The 2005 film “The World’s Fastest Indian” starring Anthony Hopkins is a great movie that memorializes Burt Monro’s achievement!

Love the Oregon license plate on the 1954 Chevy Belair Sedan that was used in the movie!

After our nature walk near Lake Gunn we continued up the highway to Marian Falls where the highway takes a 90 degree turn to follow a narrower valley between stunning cliffs flowing with multiple waterfalls to Milford Sound. We weren’t going that far this trip, but we wanted to see Marian Falls, and we were not disappointed!

We took a short hike up an easy track along the river as it flowed out of the mountains between fern covered banks.

The track then opens onto a wooden ‘viewing gantry’, or platform, cantilevered over the boulders the river is crashing down over!

There must be some awesome floods on the river taking into consideration the log balanced on the top of the upper boulder! The trail continues past the platform then narrows into a steep, muddy track going uphill to Lake Marian in a hanging valley above us. We opted not to attempt the 5 hour return hike! For several videos of the falls, check out the YouTube videos HERE! We backtracked on the highway and stopped at ‘Pop’s View Lookout’, named for a road worker who was killed in an avalanche on the Te Anau-Milford Highway in 1983.

From this vantage point we looked across the valley and up towards the hanging valley that holds Lake Marian. There is a trail somewhere under that vegetation up to the lake! We also looked down into the Hollyford Valley where Marian Falls flows into the Hollyford river/Whakatipu Kā Tuka river, where another famous NZ Walk, the Hollyford Track travels. We returned to our little cabin on Lake Manapouri and enjoyed our last night on the edge of Fiordland National Park.

Today we traveled up the Te Anau-Milford Highway, 2 lane, through the most beautiful landscape on earth!!

Stopping for pictures at Eglinton Valley and Mirror Lakes, and to marvel at the huge mountains with a smattering of snow dusting the peaks.

We continued up the road and stopped at Lake Gunn to walk the nature trail through the huge moss covered beech trees. NZ beech trees are very distantly (about 40 million years ago) related to northern hemisphere beech trees. NZ beeches are evergreen, not dropping their leaves en-mass in fall.

A beautiful day led us to a hike on part of the Kepler Track, a multi-day ‘Great Walks of NZ’. This walk took us on a different part of the same route as yesterday, along the Waiau river towards Lake Manapouri, opposite the shore where we are staying in a cabin. We started our walk at Rainbow Reach Bridge, a swingbridge over the Waiau river.

We happened to cross just when the River Jet Boat tour was zooming under the bridge! For a video check out the YouTube channel HERE!

Back into the emerald green forest, with occasional views high above the river towards distant mountains, interesting natural features and another swingbridge! We also found the skull of a stoat, known as the short-tailed weasel or ermine in North America, on top of the trap that probably killed it! The stoat was purposely introduced to NZ to control the rodents that had accidentally been introduced. Unfortunately the weasel found it much easier to prey on the flightless and flying birds of NZ that had no land mammal predators at all and were helpless in the face of this aggressive new threat. There are big wooden traps on almost every trail to trap stoats, ferrets and special traps for the larger possums, introduced for the fur trade in the 1850’s through the early 1900’s. A country wide effort is underway to make make NZ predator free by 2050, an ambitious goal that is highlighted in THIS ARTICLE.

We reached our goal of the Moturau Hut on the shore of Lake Manapouri, where we ate lunch and watched the ‘trampers’, the hikers who were mostly on the last day of their Kepler Track adventure. The smaller ‘hut’ on the left is for the guides (or rangers?). The NZ Walks are so popular that your space in the huts along the routes need to be booked well in advance and ‘free’ camping in the forest is not allowed! Cooking facilities, ‘long drop’ toilets and bunks with mattresses are provided, along with a wood stove to heat the hut and lots of firewood! This hut has a fantastic view across the lake, and even a barrel BBQ grill in the beach!

We walked a trail along the Waiau river that flows between Lake Te Anau and Lake Manapouri, through a beech forest of huge trees shading the forest floor covered in ferns or emerald green moss.

We spotted this lone ruby red mushroom cap alongside the trail, the only one of it’s kind on our 7 mile walk!

We were dwarfed by the landscape at times!