The Kepler Track & arriving at the east coast (Day 21)

After leaving Milford Sound, we freedom camped at a small DOC campsite along the Milford Road, rather than going all the way into Te Anau and paying for a more expensive spot.  We've grown fond of these basic campsites - it's the reason we have a Self-Contained sleepervan, after all.  Waking up to views of the mountains once again was definitely worth it.




After cooking breakfast, we set off for Te Anau, stopping at a few more view points along the way.  In Te Anau we headed to the iSite (they have these information sites staffed by locals in most places throughout the country, they're fantastic) to get information about hiking in Fjordland National Park.
Even though the Key Summit hike we had done up in the mountains close to Milford Sound had been in Fjordland, we wanted to experience a different part of it.  However, it seems that most of the park is inaccessible by car and/or requires a lot of alpine-hiking experience due to the constant risk of avalanches.  We were told that the Kepler Track was one of the only ways to hike through it, so we chose to start at Rainbows Reach and hike part of the trail (the entire track takes 3-4 days and is 60km long, with huts you can stay in along the way, just like the Milford Track).

The part of the track we chose is mostly on level ground with gradual slopes in some places.  This made for a more relaxing hike than some of the other, more challenging ones we have already done on this trip.  It was nice to just walk and experience the "fairy forests", as I nicknamed them.  The trees in these parts all have delicate lichens, ferns, soft moss, and other vegetation growing on all the bark, rocks, and dangling from the branches.  It looks very different than any forest I've ever been in before.  We also came across a very cool bog with bright green moss, and some other beautiful lookouts of the mountains.

Bog - J tried to walk on it and soon found herself sinking into the water!

Today is also the day I tried my hand at driving on the left side of the road for the first time.  We had generally gotten into a nice pattern - while J drove, I worked the GPS, looked through our books/pamphlets/online for other interesting things to see along the way, kept track of our finances, blogged our adventures for friends back home, kept our various electronic devices charged, etc.

Getting behind the wheel was likely a bit easier for me than it was for J because I had already experienced visually watching how to drive on the left side of the road for several weeks by watching her drive, so it wasn't quite as jarring from a sensory standpoint.  However, it was still a bit of a strange feeling trying to get used to staying in the middle of my lane rather than going too much to the left.  Thankfully I was driving on a basically deserted and quite straight highway, but I did need to constantly check the side view mirror to make sure I was the correct spacing away from the middle line.  After about an hour or so, I gave the wheel back to J, and went back to my comfortable position of navigator/tech support.

It was good that I did, because the campsite we had chosen for the night, which we thought was in a town right off the highway, was actually in a town right by the east coast that didn't have a lot of access roads to get over to it. The road over to the coast got progressively more windy, more full of gravel, and much steeper than we had anticipated.  Ol' 1997 (our affectionate name for our sleepervan) and J did an amazing job of navigating these windy, twisty roads in the darkness.  We drove up up up and down down down extremely windy gravel roads that definitely were not made with sleepervans in mind, let alone anything even bigger.  We drove through utter darkness, through silent farm fields and not a single sign of civilization in sight.  After about 20 minutes of this, we finally reached the outskirts of Brighton - what would turn out to be a charming seaside town in the daylight.

Our campsite was actually the spacious parking area of a large recreation centre that happened to be right on the ocean.  We were happy to have finally arrived and have the entire place to ourselves for once.  We chose a spot right by the ocean and settled in for the night.

The morning brought us an incredible sunrise over the ocean that we watched from bed inside our ol' 1997 - the view was definitely worth the trouble.

Woke up to this sunrise over the ocean view