We said goodbye to Te Anau today. It will remain a special place for me due to its strong lines of beauty and the untouched nature. We headed east and with some kilometers to cover, we had some road trip stretch spots, but no long tramps in the bush.
Alpaca are not native to New Zealand, they’re a recent import for farming. New Zealand has 23.59 million sheep compared to about 20,000 registered alpacas. Raising alpaca instead of sheep seems to be an easy transition here. That said, alpacas are not as easy as sheep to shear, and shearers who specialize in alpaca move from farm to farm. Alpaca fiber, especially the first shearing, called “baby alpaca,” is very soft, and many people who find wool too itchy can tolerate the alpaca. It doesn’t have lanolin like sheep wool, and it feels silkier. It also brushes nicely to make fuzzy woven cloth. We were happy to walk among the herd, and some of us got to feed them. I would say they are a bit nervous. They will kick if touched on the rump, and also don’t like being touched on the head. When they spit, their faces remain in a grimace for about twenty minutes, during which they cannot eat. This farm had show animals kept in separate paddocks.
Our next stop was to say farewell to Lake Manapouri, the lake of many islands to the Māori. We had eaten lunch here two days before, after a tramp on the Kepler track. On that day I hadn’t even realized that the lake was accessible anywhere by car. The hut on the Kepler track had felt so quiet and remote, and the shape of the lake meant it wasn’t possible to see the whole shoreline.
Lunch was toasted cheese sandwiches, aka “toasties,” and hot coffee or tea in a windy park in Lumsen. Somehow I did not take any photos of that.
We drove through Gore, which has two claims to fame. It is both the country music capital of New Zealand, and the brown trout fishing capital of New Zealand. Monuments to both distinctions are in a park. We also walked through a museum, the Eastern Southlands Gallery, with an art collection of mostly polynesian art and artifacts that is housed in a former Carnegie library. Carnegie donated eighteen libraries to this country.
A final stop was to the Wee Bookshop, which sold many used books and had many visitors to its sweet location and sweet owner who kept asking if everyone was “happy.”
And then we rode on to Balclutha. Tomorrow, the last full day of this trip, is for coastal tramping.
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