Got up this morning at 6:45am to depart Queenstown at 8:30am for the long drive to Milford Sound. Stopped for coffee and cakes at Te Anau and bought sandwiches for lunch later. Set off for Milford Sound and soon left civilisation behind. The coach driver made the point quite forcibly by asking us all to wave at the next house we passed. He then explained we were waving goodbye to civilisation. He pointed out the power line serving the house and asked us to observe no power line leaving it. It was, quite literally, the end of the line. All the rest of the way to Milford Sound was like the Wild West. No power, no telephone, no television, no mobile phone and no petrol. Perfect place to dump some celebrities and see what they get up to. Anyhow, that was why we bought lunch when we could.
What made it worse was that it rained. And rained. And rained some more. Visibility extended as far as the side of the road. OK – slight exaggeration, but no magic vistas for us to countenance. What we got were waterfalls. In abundance. A Royal Abundance, in fact. Massive mountains, shear rock faces, shedding millions of gallons of water.
We arrived at the harbour at Milford Sound and boarded our boat. I’m sure it would have been a great experience on a sunny day as you could make out the mountainsides in the gloom. We learned the hard way that the Fiordland National Park is one of the wettest places in the world. Even wetter than Blackburn.
Just prior to reaching Milford Sound we stopped off at The Chasm. This is where the Cleddau River plunges through a narrow chasm. The water display is impressive. We got soaked through but that was just the rain. Got soaked even more on the return walk. Prior to that, we drove through the Homer Tunnel. This is nearly a mile in length and was manually dug by hand (well, by pickaxe).
We sailed the length of Milford Sound but didn’t go out into the Tasman Sea but did get as far as the entrance and when the boat turned around it made for an interesting experience.
We set off back to Te Anau to stay at the Village Inn. After emerging from the Homer Tunnel the rain stopped and the sky cleared and at last we could see what we had been missing on the Milford Road. It is mainly a rainforest. The trees are so close together it looks impossible to walk through them. Where the forest opens out it is shrub land and that also looked impassable. I was very surprised to see that the majority of trees were silver beech. We also finally saw the thousands of sheep I was expecting to meet on every corner of New Zealand. So far the sheep had been conspicuous by their absence but we saw them now.
We arrived back at Te Anau about 6:45pm. It had been a long day but we managed to make it to the restaurant. There is no WiFI or any connection to the Internet available at the hotel so I will have to post this tomorrow in Dunedin.
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