NZ Day 6 - Restish Day

Friday, 16 December 2022

Today we enjoyed not having people rustling bags and stomping around our beds, so we were all able to  sleep in until after 9 then Jon cooked up a delicious late breakfast.

After breakfast we started on the list of the top 15 things to do in and around Te Anau. Quite a few of them were related to the Kepler track, so we could immediately tick them off. One of the others was the local bird sanctuary. We were curious as to the appearance of the often mentioned Takahe bird.  Apparently there was one quite near one of the huts we stayed in, and there are only 100 left in the wild (they can't fly so are pretty susceptible to all of NZ feral pests). I was expecting a turbo chook type creature but it was actually much bigger and much more colourful:

After the birds we went to another of the must-do destinations - The Ivon Wilson park just by the lake which conveniently had a frisbee golf course that we took advantage of:

Then we tried the famous local pie shop but it was closed so we'll have to visit another time.  After some more actual resting and a few loads of washing we donned running gear and I dropped Jon and Jett off at Rainbow Reach to run the final section of the Kepler which we missed. In the meantime I drove around to the control gates and did an out and back run while I waited. It was a beautiful section of trail which was a delight to run on.

After dinner we went down to the lake to check out the sunset, which is supposed to look amazing, but tonight only looked like this, so we'll have to try again another night: