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!

We’ve had some rainy, cold weather but we finally got out of the cabin and walked around the tiny town of about 270 people.

The main structures of ‘town’ appear to be an old church and related buildings. The Waiau river flows into Lake Manapouri and the dock is where tourists catch the lake ferry to travel across the lake, board a bus to travel over a pass, then board their boat for a trip of a lifetime on Doubtful Sound! The mural is on the wall of the library and displays a Tui with the white feather tufts on the throat, and a colorful Takahe. Takahe were considered extinct as of 1898 until a small population was found in the mountains nearby in 1948. They have been protected since and have recovered to about 500 birds currently.

The old church building houses ‘The Church Bar and Eatery’, built about 115 years ago and beautifully restored! We enjoyed a couple of beers at the pulpit!

We arrived at our next weeks’ destination, Manapouri, gateway to Doubtful Sound and western most municipality in NZ (although there’s a lot more land further west, there are no other settlements in the Fiordlands)!

On the shore of huge Lake Manapouri, where the mists obscured the many mountains of Fiordland.

The lush vegetation across from our cabin showcases some iconic NZ plants. Tree ferns are dwarfed by huge cabbage trees, looking like multi-headed palms. Underneath is a stand of mountain flax, the bright green and white grassy-looking plant, a staple used by Maori for weaving baskets, mats, sandals and even rain-shedding capes.