We booked a half price cruise on the Sound, $49pp, leaving at 11a.m. Quite an early start for us, on the road at 7.30! We had left ourselves plenty of time, so we thought, and stopped off at Mirror Lakes.
There are usually several buses that drop off at one end, then slowly move up to the other end of the boardwalk to collect their passengers. No buses and only one other person when we were there! Same story in Milford. The bus park that usually holds 50 buses was empty apart from a couple of cars and a truck.
There were very few vehicles on the road in. The only vehicles that passed us were people working on the road. And, as we discovered, checking road conditions. We were stopped and told to pull over because of black ice ahead. We had to wait more than 20 minutes for a grit truck to go through. Then we just missed the green light for the tunnel, so had to wait another 8 minutes there. So we arrived at the car park with minutes to spare. A quick dash to an empty terminal and we boarded just on 11, along with a Canadian couple, the last on board, whew!
The trip was very pleasant, much the same as it was when I last did it about 25 years ago. Except we were literally the only boat on the Sound, even better than back then. And quite amazing since before COVID there would have been a couple of cruise ships as well as 7 or 8 other boats! Most of the passengers were foreigners, to our surprise. Young people stuck, or who have chosen to stay, in NZ where it is safer. They didn’t seem too concerned about social distancing so we stayed, mostly on our own, in the cabin while they crowded outside in the bow and stern. It hadn’t rained for a while so the waterfalls were smallish, but a pod of dolphins treated us to a great display.
No comments:
Post a Comment