As my eyelids grated across my eyesballs at 6:15 in the morning we got ready to head to Manapouri and its strangely named Pearl Harbour. We had a day cruise out onto Doubtful Sound and were looking forward to the exclusivity and the surroundings of the experience. The cruise would eventually end in us meeting the Tasman Sea and being at the most westerly point of NZ and a mere 900 miles from Tasmani.

Brushing my teeth in the harbour's toilets while swatting NZ's pesky sand flies away had become a strange sort of norm over the last several days and I finished with less squirming and more efficiency than previous toilet encounters.

Once aboard our boat, The Fiordland Flyer, and eyeballing our glorious looking free packed lunch we set off across Manapouri lake. The lake seemed jet black due to its depth and intense concentration of tannin which the water picks up as it's filtered through the dense forest surrounding it, giving it a strong-tea colour.

After a 45 minute boat trip we arrived at Dark Cove and were ushered on board a coach for the second leg of our journey by a driver that was very hard to surmise. He said outlandish things over the tannoy system, like: 'Please don't kill the sand flies here, as they're a protected species' and 'We have so many possums here, if we run over them on the road we like them to stay dead, no need to call a vet out here' - initially everyone chortled along as you're supposed to but eventually we started shooting each other worried glances; were we being driven by a lunatic?

Madness aside he did give some gems of information from behind his pulpit-esc driving chair! He told us that the only mammals native to NZ are bats and that they - as well as birds and reptiles - are the only animals that haven't been introduced to the islands. He also explained that rabbits were brought over as a means of providing food but two rabbits quickly became 2.9 million in the South Island alone. As a result, stoats were introduced to hunt the rabbits but they quickly learnt that NZ's flightless birds were much easier to catch and now NZ has a stoat and rabbit problem! On every small bridge that we crossed he would pause to look for the lucrative blue duck/whio bird which is important enough to adorn the ten dollar note, but unfortunately we didn't see any.

Coasting down the steepest commercial hill through the thick forest (I say forest as apparently a jungle is classed by trees that lose their leaves all year round whereas a forest loses them seasonally) we had a great view of Doubtful Sound. A sound is a stretch of water connecting to the sea which was made by a glacier. Apparently, some 250 years ago Captain James Hook sailed past and refused to enter the Sound as he feared we wouldn't get an easterly breeze to get the ship back to sea, as a result he simply wrote 'doubtful harbour' on his map, hence its name.

The sound itself looked Jurassic from our boat and not a very inviting place to settle; in fact, there was only one building out on the lake and that was a tiny crayfish catching raft. Out at the mouth of the sound a fur seal colony was basking on some rocks, they just looked like large slugs on the grey granite stone.

All in all it was a very memorable trip with great scenery and nature and I would recommend it. Now for the four hour drive to Dunedin...