Te Anau, New Zealand

We arrive in Te Anau in the evening and we directly go to sleep because we will have to wake up early tommorrow morning in order to avoid the crowd in the Milford Sounds. We don’t sleep very well because there’s a storm and it’s so strong that the car moves slightly. We hit the road in the early morning and the landscape is absolutely amazing but after about 20 minutes we are stopped by a worker who informs us that the road is closed due to a mud sliding caused by the storm. There are loads of huge trees on the road and he doesn’t know how long it will take to remove them but the road will surely not be reopenned before tomorrow. What a sad news, it means that we will have to give up on the Milford Sounds because we don’t have the time to wait for the road to be cleared and there is no other way to reach them. We therfore go to Dunedin instead and take some pictures of the steepest road in the world. We then drive to the Otaga peninsula and chase a sealion on the beach before heading to some dunes known to host a yellow eyed pinguin’s colony. We manage to see some of them but from far because they are very shy creatures unlike the sealions that just lay on the beach barely moving while you take some pictures of them. It was nice but tireing because to reach the beach we needed to walk 40 minutes up and down the dunes. It remembered us of Namibia except that here, the air is much cooler.