Luckily the next garage was just 200m from where our car broke down. We could enjoy free wifi inside of our van and we had running water and a rubbish bin just next to our van. The mechanic confirmed our guess of a leaking pipe beeing the problemmaker and he confirmed our hope for a cheap repair. We only had to wait for about 5 hours until the replacements arrived.
With our car fixed and a full tank we headed up north to Milford Sound, one of the most wet places in the world (6500mm rain/year). As expected it did rain, but we found a nice lodge to hang out in the evening. It had an massiv drying room, hot showers and power outlets. All we needed! We met our friend Roman in the very same moment when we arrived at the lodge. It was a pleasant moment, since we haven’t seen him for two years now.
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| Hike through the rainforest of Milford Sound: Little Babylon |
The next day we went climbing in Little Babylon. The approach to this crag was quite an effort, having a baby with us. It was a 30 minutes hike uphill through the rainforest with a lot of mud and some two hand scrambling passages.
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| Getting ready for a fotoshooting |
The climbing was really good, the rock quality is amazing, for route climbing it’s definitivly the very best I’ve seen in Newzealand so far! In spite of our lacking endurance (we haven’t touched a rope since about two years ago, we usually prefer bouldering) the route were very long but we enjoyed climbs such as the classic „International Turkey Patrol“, „Jugular“ and „Rua Tahi“.
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| Queenstown Lakes |
After two days of climbing, to many sandfly stitches and several layers of wet clothes we felt exhausted and went back on the road. Back to Queenstown Lakes we drove, were we did a quick afternoon bouldering session in the Jardines.
Our next stop will be Wanaka, before seighting the westcoast of Newzealand.