| New Zealand South Island: Milford |
| on to Dunedin ...or |
| We had a good reason for leaving Queenstown at 6:30 am. This was the height of tourist season. Milford Sound has got to be one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country and it has only one road going in or out. Te Anau (where we would be staying the night) is only 2 hours away from Queenstown on the way to Milford, but all of the tourist buses pull out of there at 9am and form an impassable line down the exact same route that we would be travelling. Our mission - get ahead of them! :) And with the exception of a couple of stray Japanese tourist buses, we proudly succeeded! The drive towards the sound is quite pretty as you head towards a mountain pass, and the guidebook provides a few lookout points along the 2 hour drive to keep the tourists amused! The first was a place called the Mirror Lakes. Given that Lake Matheson had been a wash up, this was actually quite a nice stop (save a reflection-defacing duck). The duck made ripples that intefered with the reflection of the mountains in the water. I, however, went a few meters down the creek and got a photo of the reflection of the mountains under a tree. (pics below) |
| Frank & Lisa's Amazing Aotea/Kiwi/NZ Adventures |
| Northern Territory: Red Centre , 2 / Top End , 2 NSW & ACT: Hunter Valley / Sydney / Canberra , 2 Queensland Coast: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 South Australia: Barossa Valley / Kangaroo Island / McLaren Vale & Coonawarra Victoria: Great Ocean Road , 2 , 3 / Melbourne New Zealand (North Island): Aukland / Rotorua / Tongariro / Wellington (South Island): Nelson / Westland / Queenstown / Milford / Dunedin / Mt Cook / Christchurch |
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| By the time we hit our next stop, it had started raining again. First, though, there was a brief walk up towards a series of waterfalls where the rain was coming off the mountains (pic below left). (Yes, that is snow in the middle of summer. We were high in the mountains.) It also gave great views of the mountains to the west (pic below right). When we were done the walk and got back into our car a kea (see the pesky bird from Queenstown) landed on our roof attempting to catch the aerial. In the slippery conditions it skidded right off and over the back fo the car to land on the ground. Neither of us was game enough to get out and make sure it was okay. |
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| We were about to enter the Homer Tunnel (pic below left). This famous tunnel would take us into the sound. The tunnel, however, is an experience in itself. It is 2 km on a very steep slope downwards with no light and two narrow lanes in a perfectly circular hole boared through solid rock. I took some pictures inside, but we couldn't slow down enough to get a good picture in that kind of darkness. This postcard shows you what it was like (pic below right). |
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| I was beginning to take our rain woes personally until I read that Milford Sound gets an average of 6 meters of rain a year! Apparently it is actually abnormal to see it on a sunny day... We had one stop left before we actually reached the fiord that is Milford Sound and our cruise. The chasm, as it is named, lies a few minutes down a path inside a mossy beech forest (pic below left). It is an intensely powerful river/stream that has created a deep crevice in the rock it has eroded away over the years and as you approach it a strange roaring filters into the peaceful silence (pic below right). |
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| Our next and final destination of our trip was Milford Sound itself! We arrived about 1 1/2 hours early for our tour, so we ate lunch in our car before heading off down one of the short walking tracks in the area. We also took advantage of a lookout towards Mitre Peak for photo opps. To give you an idea of the scale of |
| the place, Mitre Peak (the tallest peak on the left of the top picture below) is over a mile high. As we ate, about 20 big tour buses filtered in and unloaded their endless cruise passengers. Fortunately, they were all booked on cruises between 12:30 and 1:30. So by the time we boarded our 2pm cruise, there were only a total of about 12 of us on a boat that could easily seat 200. That meant no jostling for position for photo-taking. In fact, during the heavier rainfall, there were only 3 of us out on deck at all! Milford Sound (actually a fiord) was carved into the earth by a glacier thousands of years ago. In fact, the peaks you see are only the very highest of a towering mountain range that lies mostly underwater. We took about a million photos of towering waterfalls (one was 50 stories high), huge cliffs, frollicking seals & other astounding views, but the photos just can't do it justice. (pics below) |
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| We traced the same route back to Te Anau that afternoon and checked into our hotel. After having a huge |
| meal at a great steakhouse we headed off to meet our boat for our tour of the Te Anau glowworm caves. We actually have glowworms in the rainforests on the Gold Coast, but Frank had never seen them and these ones were hiding away in apparently massive numbers in the bowels of a limestone cave system. So it seemed like a worthwhile trip. Except for the logistical issues (you spent about 2 1/2 hours travelling and sitting around to get a 20 |
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| minute tour with 5 minutes of glowworm viewing, without even a decent explanation of glowworms and their life cycles), the glowworm cave ceiling was pretty breathtaking. Once again, you can't photograph the little nocturnal critters because they shut off at the first sign of light or danger, so here is a postcard to give you an idea of what you see (pic above right). It's like hundreds upon hundreds of little blue stars on the cave ceiling (it gets more and moe brilliant as your eyes adjust to th dark). |
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| We had gotten up at about 5:30 am and returned from this tour at around 11pm, so we had had a full day and were more than ready for bed. The next day we were off to Dunedin and another packed day of sightseeing. (The remaining travel pages will actually be stored on Frank's homepage because I have run out of disk space on Yahoo! with all of our travel chronicles to date, but you can still navigate them the same and access them from here! Enjoy!) |