Tuesday 17 March 2026 – RealNZ has an exclusive on tours to the glowworm caves, and it appears that they are also the only operator to offer a tour to Doubtful Sound, which, with Milford Sound, are the two soundest things to do around these parts. So, after a very decent breakfast at Dunluce, we headed into downtown Te Anau, with its takahē sculpture,

and took a coffee before presenting ourselves once again at the RealNZ office on the waterfront for a whole day outing.

The reason that it’s a whole day outing is that Doubtful Sound is basically inaccessible unless you sail up the west coast and enter it from the Tasman Sea. RealNZ have created a different way of getting there by exploiting an approach route set up for something completely else and patching it into a package which takes you from Te Anau via a bus, a boat and another bus to a boat which goes out on the Sound. It’s rather reminiscent of our journey in South America from Bariloche to Puertas Varas, but without the awkwardness of crossing national borders. Here’s a rough map in case it helps understand how everything fits together.

Our first (and last) driver was a very jocular Yorkshireman called Josh. Based on his accent, I wanted to call him the driver from Hull, but annoyingly he came from somewhere near Huddersfield. He took us through some wonderful morning light and weather

to the RealNZ wharf in Manapōuri where our boat awaited us.

This boat took us across Lake Manapōuri (proudly New Zealand’s second deepest lake) for about an hour. It was still earlyish in the day and the wind hadn’t ruffled the waters too much, so to start with there were some nice reflections of the impressive scenery to be photographed.

As I was taking these photos, standing on the rear outside deck of the boat, I was irritated to hear a Brit holding forth loudly to some poor souls near him on his favourite subject – himself.  Fortunately, before too long the skipper gunned the engines and I could no longer hear him. Imagine my surprise on returning to join Jane in the lounge, to find that he had glommed on to her for a chat listen. So we were treated to his itinerary around New Zealand, which was quite short because he said his wife wouldn’t let him go for an longer. Frankly, I would have thought that she would have been content with some more peace and quiet. After a while, in self-defence, I went back out to take more photos.  Fortunately, it’s generally a very scenic crossing; Lake Manapōuri is considered (by newzealand.com, at least) to be New Zealand’s loveliest lake, and it does have some great scenery.

This boat took us to the furthest reaches of the lake, called West Arm, where, as we approached, we could see some very considerable evidence of a large power station;

pylons to left and right, with, strung between them, cables covering a 1.8km span – that’s over a mile long. By the cables on the right (northern) bank was the external evidence of the power station, which, in its way, was the reason we were able to visit Doubtful Sound by the route we were taking.

At the West Arm RealNZ visitor centre, we transferred to three coaches and were driven the 21km across Wilmot Pass to Deep Cove, at the eastern end of Doubtful Sound. Our driver was a South African called Johnny, who had a very dry sense of humour. For example, on a steep downhill section, he reassured us that the coach’s brakes were tested – once a year, and that test was due to be done tomorrow.

He explained that the road he was driving us on was a key part of developing the huge hydro-electric power station we’d seen, Manapōuri Power Station. The original plan, in around 1969, had been quite radical – simply raise the level of Lake Manapōuri by some 30 metres via a huge dam to merge it with Lake Te Anau and – hey presto! – lots of hydro power available to be generated from this superlakive source of water. The reason to attempt this enormous power generation? All stemmed from the 1955 discovery by one Harry Evans, a New Zealand geologist with Consolidated Zinc Proprietary Ltd, of a 2.5 billion tonne deposit of bauxite in Australia on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula – the  largest deposit of bauxite that had ever been discovered. A company called Comalco (now owned by Rio Tinto) was created to exploit its smelting into aluminium, with a smelter near Bluff, nominating Lake Manapōuri as the power source. Without public consultation, the Second Labour Government under Walter Nash signed a deal in January 1960 that would allow Comalco to build the dam and associated tunnels to lead the outflow water to the nearby Waiau River.

Unsurprisingly, quite a lot of people disapproved of this idea, roughly 50-60 square kilometres of native forests and wetlands would have been permanently submerged; but successive governments ignored protest. A book, Heritage Destroyed, written in 1960 by entomologist Dr. John Salmon at Victoria University, advocated an end to hydropower projects that sacrificed the environmental value of the land they submerged, and this was a seed that grew eventually, in 1969, to the Save Manapouri campaign, which became a significant part of the awakening to a realisation of the damage that big business could cause to the environment, not just in New Zealand, but internationally. Environmental Activism was born (which is a Good Thing until its over-enthusiastic application results in, oh, I dunno, a UK £100million cost for a railway tunnel to protect some bats, for example).

Long story short, the dam did not go ahead. Instead, a new plan was drawn up which didn’t involve raising the level of Lake Manapōuri; instead the turbine hall was built deep inside the mountain, some 200m below the lake surface, with water flowing vertically down to several turbines. The new plan did involve drilling a long tunnel between West Arm and Deep Cove for the outflow of the turbines to empty into Doubtful Sound. Drilling was planned from both locations, but it turned out that getting men, machinery and materials to Deep Cove – accessible only by sea – was impracticable and ruinously expensive. So someone, it seemed, piped up with “Why don’t we just build a road between West Arm and Deep Cove? What could possibly go wrong?” Quite a lot, it turned out, as there was a lot of very tough rock to be blasted through, and the eventual cost of the road was NZ$2 per centimetre. That’s $200,000 per kilometre and there were 21 of those needed.

 

This, then was the road that Johnny drove us along, pausing at a high point so that we could get our first glimpse of Doubtful Sound in the distance.

Having debussed at RealNZ’s Deep Cove visitor hut, we milled around being bitten by sandflies until we were allowed on to the somewhat larger and more comfortable boat which would be taking us around the Sound on a 3-hour cruise, with commentary from a guide.

Again, the scenery was quite dramatic,

but I have to say that once you’ve seen one huge lump of fjord-adjacent terrain covered in rainforest, you’ve pretty much seen ’em all, so it was easier to appreciate the scenery rather than to try to take more photos. A break in the unchanging nature of the view came as we entered the Tasman Sea at the mouth of the Sound.

At this point, the guide explained a couple of things about Doubtful Sound: firstly, because the whole thing has been carved out by glacial activity, it’s a fjord, not a sound (and the same applies, by the way to the rather more widely-known Milford Sound); secondly, the name comes as a consequence of the prevailing winds, which are westerly and therefore blow into the sound. The area was mapped and charted by Cook on his voyages around the islands. Before venturing into the sound, he assessed the risks associated with being blown in by the wind and then becalmed and therefore unable to get out again. Because he was doubtful of the wisdom of sailing in, he christened it “Doubtful Harbour”.

There was a group of smaller, rocky islands beside the rather larger Secretary Island which is the gatekeeper for the Sound.

The observant among you will have seen the brown flecks on the rocks in the photo above. These are members of a permanent fur seal colony which has this area as its main residence.

Lots of guests appreciated this variety in the surroundings and came to view the seals (which are sealions, of course, but you knew that, didn’t you?).

The scenery reverted back to the “cliffs and rainforest” sort as we headed back towards Deep Cove.

At one point we passed a “tree avalanche”. The trees are clinging on to steep rocks with the shallowest but widest of (therefore interlaced) roots. Occasionally, often weather-driven, the cling isn’t enough and one tree comes away, taking with it all the others on its way down.

We had a delicious comedy moment on the way back, too.  The cruise featured the pretentious thing where the skipper turns all the engines off and those that wanted to could go outside and appreciate the beauty of the environment with just its natural soundtrack. The guide told us to make all our phones silent and asked that no-one clattered around the boat for the five minutes or so that this lasted. Almost everybody obeyed this, with only one or two idiots walking around to get more photos. Silence reigned. Well, it would have, except for one very young boy. He made quite a noise shouting for his mummy and telling her (and, thus everyone) that he’d fallen down. She managed to quiet him for a few seconds and silence reigned once again until he piped up once more in the loud voice that toddlers specialise in using at the wrong moment: “Mummy, why has the boat stopped?”

Back at the visitor centre at Deep Cove, we milled around for several more minutes, giving the sandflies another chance for a feed. Inside the centre were some information displays, including a couple of interesting ones concerning the power station: a 1-in-8 model of one of the seven turbines, used to ensure correct design;

and a cutaway model showing the various tunnels through which the water flows to drive the turbines.

The turbines are in the yellow chamber (the tunnels to it are access tunnels); the water goes down from the lake, through the turbine and exits stage left above on its way to Deep Cove and Doubtful Sound. As we were to learn later, there’s quite a large amount of water management attached to this power station. It’s important to maintain the levels in Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri, irrespective of wet or dry weather, and so there are dams and valves to divert or block flow in the associated Mararoa and Waiau rivers. All for a bit of aluminium; the hydro power doesn’t go to any other users, if I understand it correctly.

The journey back from Doubtful Sound was, unsurprisingly, the reverse of the way out with one exception; Josh, when driving us on the Manapouri – Te Anau leg, put in a small diversion by request of one of the passengers so that we could look at “two wee bookshops”. Whatever image that might have created in our minds, it wasn’t this.

They are the creation of Ruth Shaw, who started out selling books in her one “wee bookshop”; the business expanded and she now has two wee bookshops, and very charming they look, too. We hadn’t time to stop, but it was lovely to see this characterful, colourful, cultural oasis in Manapouri.

And so came to an end our short stay in Te Anau; we had the prospect of a leisurely progress further south the next day with – we hoped – an important date with more wildlife. Stay tuned to see how it worked out.