Bad cold!!! Am. heavy rain, packed-up - away from mountains the weather changed. Got to Gore - our furthest south place - lunch in Green Room cafe next to cinema. Gore even had a large dep. store. Got to Alexandra. Shopped at New World. Otago wine! V. good. Hotel excellent. Good kitchen & bathroom. Sore throat. Yuk. Cooked in room.
We now had less than a week to go before our flight home. Still, we had planned a highlight or two to look forward to before 'endishness' kicked in. Next, a visit to Clyde and a trip down the Otago cycle trail, then onwards to Glentanner and the eastern slopes of Mount Cook before spending the final two days at Akaroa. Travelling the way we do takes energy and the one thing you want to avoid is getting sick. Sadly Gill seemed to going down with a flu-like cold. Luckily today there was nothing for her to do except sit and watch the scenery go by as we drove from Te Anau to Alexandra. In the South Island you rarely get anywhere quickly, there are few roads in the sparsely populated Otago and Southlands region and often they are narrow and somewhat potholed. As the crow flies it is 80 miles from Te Anau to Alexandra, by road over 150 miles. You have a choice, back rowards Queenstown or south across the empty Southland plains to Gore, then north through the southern Ortago. We chose the latter route because it was all new territory.
In Southland settlements are few and far between and the land itself looks poor. We aimed to get to Gore for lunch, I was not expecting much from Gore as the area looks a bit scrubby and somewhat impoverished. In fact the small town turned out to be delightful. Though it only has a little over 8000 inhabitants because it serves the needs of the scattered farming communities for miles around the place had the services you would normally associated with a much bigger town such as an old fashioned department store, a cinema and small theatre, interesting independent shops and quirky cafes.
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| Smith's 'Progressive' stores - very 'Kiwi' |
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| Fabulous Art Decor shopfronts |
From Gore it was a 90 mile drive north to our motel in Alexandra. We had reached our furthest point south and as far from home as we would get on this trip, 12,222 miles to be exact, as Google maps advised us. I think if you are an inveterate traveller there is always something poignant about this moment of turning homewards. We were so close to the end point of Highway I, it would have been great to be able to dtive 50 miles further to New Zealand's southernmost point, but on a big trip with limited time you make compromises, lots of places we would have loved to explore - Northland, Stewart Is, Dunedin, Christchurch - next time we agreed.
As Gill commented, as we drove north the weather alternated between brief sunny intervals and chunky downpours with spectacular cloudscapes in-between. My trusty travelling companion felt distinctly changeable too, ok at times, then shivery moments interspersed with feverish ones. We were glad to reach the hotel at Alexandra which was comfortable and well appointed.
