I spent the day roaming around a 200 million year old rainforest and then kayaked all afternoon before feeding some longfin eels, because somehow that’s my life at the moment.
The rainforest continues to fascinate. I’ve seen rainforest elsewhere, but it always seemed like a normal forest that was much lusher and more overgrown. Here, it’s primordial. Twenty foot tall tree ferns tower over you, while lichens that are a foot across hang from the massive limbs of 1000 year old trees. Ferns and orchids grow on every exposed surface of every trunk and branch. I was humming the Jurassic Park theme while hiking today, and it seemed as if a herd of small dinosaurs might be around the next corner everywhere I went.
After a morning spent hiking in the forest, I hopped into one of the lodge’s kayaks for the afternoon. A short paddle up the river to the lake put me in view of the waterfowl, and in a country with few natural predators they all apparently decided that I was the scariest thing on the planet and fled whenever I got within fifty meters. It was nonetheless a relaxing way to spend two hours, silently gliding through the water with rainforest all around.
Tomorrow it’s north to the town of Franz Josef for a stop to see some of glaciers that flow west over the mountains, then it will take another day to get up to the next pass back east over the mountains and on towards Abel Tasman National Park on the South Island’s north coast.
Love the swans!