Te Anau Top 10

Driving back to Te Anau from Milford was quite sad – we’d had an amazing time, despite the awful weather, and it’s one of the most breathtaking places I’ve ever visited. I am so grateful we made the decision to go a day early and see it in the sunshine – our final view of Milford was this...

I wrote about the Homer Tunnel in the most about our arrival to Milford Sound, but here’s a video of the tunnel – see how roughly hewn the walls are, and the rather worrying amount of water pouring through the rocks!

The journey to Te Anau was wet, but uneventful, and we ended at another Top 10 campsite. These are a chain of sites across NZ, usually with excellent facilities – and therefore more expensive than the very basic DOC (Department of Conservation) sites.

This one, we discovered, is a Top 10 ‘Premium’ – the main difference being a hot tub garden, with three private hot tubs looking out over Lake Te Anau (the largest body of fresh water in the Southern Hemisphere).

Jess saw the magic words ‘hot tub’ on a leaflet when we were checking in – and it turned out it was actually in our holiday park!  So we booked it for after dinner (due to a gentleman moving his booking literally as we walked into reception to ask about availability).

It was lovely – with a super hot pump that made it almost too hot – they provided plastic wine glasses, which we made use of with our delicious Akarua chardonnay.  And, it had its own drinking water tap by the side – very civilised!

Slightly oddly, it was an infinity pool, with no water capture – but that’s because it is untreated fresh water from the lake, because (of course) the water is so pure here.