Getting Online in NZ: "Please Don’t Skype!"

We love New Zealand like an adopted son, but there is one little thing that we also love and miss terribly during our time here. That would be our seamless, fast, cheap and always reliable web connections in the US.

People here actually pay for bandwidth…yes, that’s right nobody knows what their monthly bill will be. So as we checked into this B&B by Lake Manapouri, the proprietor told us that we couldn’t use Skype, our favorite means of calling home. Nope, it takes too much bandwidth. Ugh. We also laughed because the password she handed us was CIA-level strong, a string of about 50 letters and numbers that required very careful typing. It made us appreciate the first place we stayed where there was no password.

We’ve been so used to our iPhones and the easy means with which we get our email it’s taken some adjustments. But it’s hardly worth a quibble, even though for the next 30 hours we’ll be out of all range in the gloriously remote Doubtful Sound.

This boat trip will take us over Lake Manapouri, then a 45-minute bus, then to a boat called the SeaFinn which will cruise all the way to the ocean overnight. I am sure it will be raining most of the time since it’s one of the world’s wettest places. Silent tall fjord cliffs and no one there but us.

Milford Sound is the number one South Island attraction, every day dozens of buses wind their way down the famous road to this fjord…but we chose the less crowded Doubtful Sound with much of the same topography (in the same Fjordland National Park) but less traveled.