Into the wild

Easter bulletin

We are back in one of my favourite places in the world. Here is the second largest and third deepest lake in Aotearoa looking first rate.

Yesterday morning, I joined a 5km fun run from the Lake Te Anau Control Gates to the Takahē Sanctuary and back.

I did not come first or second or third, but I did go past two Takahē, plump as Christmas turkeys and magnificently plumed.

We had a splendid coffee with reader Helen Matthews — hello Helen! — at one of my favourite cafés in the world, and then we strolled over to the park to watch feats of human fortitude at the Te Anau Tartan Festival. Hello fellow readers of Scots descent, this had my MacKenzie blood pumping. 

A squad of half a dozen men and half a dozen women, who you'd imagine in their day jobs must be personal trainers or firefighters, were kilted up and put to various tasks of stone putting and weight carrying over distance at a pace, event after event after event for hours and hours. My only question is why you would call it Highland Games and not Mackathlon.

Everyone cheered, often. Occasionally we gasped at stupendous feats.

It’s worth getting up early and eating porridge for, no question.

We are at the front door to Fiordland National Park. The next step after Te Anau is completely off the grid. No bars, no signals, no Twitter.

That’s where we’re bound, into the magnificent wilderness.

We expect to be back out on Saturday, so the newsletter machine will be going quiet until the weekend. See you then.