After a long wait in the visitor centre, during which I wrote and uploaded the blog for the morning, at last the time arrived for the visit to the Manapouri underground hydro-electric plant. There were only 8 visitors on the trip, not surprising as it hadn't been advertised as available.
We descended by coach along a 2.2 km road spiralling into the ground. At the end we all dismounted and walked down to the main hall observation level. Cath, our very knowledgeable guide, then told us all about the power station and it's building, whilst other panels of information and videos were also available. We then returned to the visitor centre, and caught a boat back to Manapouri.
There was a lot of rain on the way back, and Mick and I both fell asleep for some of the journey. Finally back at our campervan we celebrated with an ice cream from the freezer before working out our plans for the rest of the day.
The plan basically ended up as: drive to Te Anau and get a leaflet about the possible walks from the Milford Sound road, then find a campsite. The former failed as the DOC centre closed just before we found it (but we did see a Tui bird in the car park), but the latter worked brilliantly.
We found a DOC campsite at Henry Creek and parked looking out at the lake.
A short walk on the shore then it was back to the van for nibbles, beer and wine, whilst we planned our movements for the next few days. If only we had had a phone signal we could have made some bookings, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, as will posting this section of the blog!
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