Rambling On: Milford Sound

A few more observations:

None of us has ever experienced this before, but we keep hitting birds with the car or seeing other people hitting birds. This is unexplainable. Why are they flying so low and why are they so easy to hit? Ugh. Alissa says this will be part of the evolutionary process.

There are deer inside fences, grazing in herds and they are sleek and chubby just like the horses and cows. This was the NZ response to too many wild deer destroying the natural habitat. And there are only 6 ft fences around the deer. They must be so fat they can't jump.

In a guidebook at our current house, the NZ accent is described as "sweetly mangled vowels." The person who wrote that description came from England and emigrated to Australia so he would have a particular angle on the vowels.

There are so few mammals here. We keep trying to identify the roadkill and they all have dark brown fur and they are probably opossums.

Oh, except for sheep. Many sheep. Can't have a day without a sheep picture.

Let's not forget the cows, too.

The key feature that makes NZ so unique and amazing is its remoteness. This is why paradise is not yet overrun with humans. It is really far away and hard to get to. And now they won't let you come here unless you have a solid plan to leave.

We had only one real plan for today and it involved a long journey on a winding, hilly road. We set out in plenty of time, with enough food to get us all the way through the day. First we stopped in Te Anau to see about the market but it was really just a local flea market, nothing to do with fruit or vegetables so we moved on. We drove through increasingly dramatic scenery, with more steep mountains rising up from lakes and valleys, more waterfalls coming straight down sheer cliffs, lots of birch trees and tropical undergrowth hugging the road.

Pictures along the way.

Refreshing waterfalls.

At about 11:30 we stopped so Jon and Alissa could go on a hike and I could stay in the shade and read my book. They were gone for longer than expected but they got all the way to the summit and took lots of pictures along the way.

This tarn (divot cut out by a glacier) was dry but left wild colored moss.

Alissa says it was a three hour intermediate difficulty hike and they got a lot of bang for their buck -- shady for a while and then you push hard and you get up to great views of the valley below. There were plenty of other people doing the same trail.

Now the views from the top. Looking west toward the fiord with the valley stream visible.

More tarns and the path visible.

Right in the middle you can see a little of a lake tarn up in the saddle between mountains.

Waterfalls all around the fiord.

Sheer rock walls, with mountains
looming above.

Our destination was Milford Sound, really a fiord (that's how they spell it here). We took a cruise on a smaller boat, through the fiord that went for over eight miles before it came out on the Tasman Sea. The glacier had left a deep clear path to the ocean, with steep cliffs that are now covered with vegetation that grows out of the rock. The captain made announcements from time to time but we could only understand about 25% of his words. He was speaking English but those vowels were quite mangled. Mostly he was telling us how tall the mountains were, how deep the water was, how long ago the glacier moved th

rough here (17,000 years), how many crayfish they catch on this coast (I forget but it was some number like 1700 tons), and why the dolphins aren't showing up today (sunny and beautiful, they usually come out when it rains).

Looking back into the fiord from out at sea.

"Seal Rock."

Windy on the boat.

On the way to the sound, there was a tunnel that was one way only. When we got to the sign it said the wait would be over five minutes. There was plenty of scenery to admire and we didn't mind. The tunnel itself was a marvel of engineering and nothing all that fancy. Spooky and dark and rugged. Would not want that to be a two way tunnel.