4:45am the alarm went off this morning it was time to get up for our big day trip to Milford Sound. We were all downstiars and in the car at 6 and set off for our adventure. We made a few stop offs on our way there. However the first part of the drive was stunning. We got he drne out a few times and took some video of the area. I can not belive that a country can have so much beauty in it. The clouds were literraly so close to the ground. It looked like they ad fallen out of the sky. We watched the sun rise over a lake where there was snow capped mountains. So so beautiful.
We stopped at a random lake which was beautiful and Anth and I had our breakfast with a view. The scenery around here is bloody beautiful and I am not sure if the pictures will show beautiful it is. We decided no more stops until Te Anau as we still needed to drive a long way. After about a 3 hour drive we arrived at Te Anau and stopped so the others could get some breakfast. Anthony and I went and found some stuff to mount the go pro to the front of the car. We found a guy in the photo shop in Te Anau who was so helpful he pulled out a whole bag of go pro bits and pieces and tried to help us piece together a contraption. We got something that worked.
It was a bit after 10 by the time we were back on the road and this time we were headed to Milford Sound. This drive was meant to be quiet scenic so we were pretty excited. Firstly the drive was beautiful the scenery changed from flowingfeilds, to farm, to rain forests and finally to snow capped and gigantic mountains. I have never seen mountains like it… but I degress as our first stop was to the flowing fields.
We stopped along with the 400 tourist buses at the fields near knobs flat. The view was beautiful and the grass was flowing beautifully. The best thing was watching the Chinese tourist bus people taking pictures with their ipads. We jumped back into the car and went to Mirror Lakes. Its a 5 minute return walk to the lake and it is very pretty. My favourite part was the sign that said Mirror Lake that was mirrored in the Lake.
We were cutting it pretty close time wise now so we made the decision for no more stops. The end of the drive was driven through huge mountains most of them with snow on it. Our pictures of these mountains do not give context to how big these actually were. We made it to the homer tunnel and went through. It was quite scary. The homer tunnel is a tunnel that is quite literally drilled through the middle of the mountain, It is 1.2km tunnel that does straight through the mountain. Coming out at the other. end was amazing as looking out at the view of giant mountains made you feel very small.
Finally after lots of driving we made it to Milford sound. We parked the car and walked in to collect our tickets for our Jucy Cruise. We had made it just in time as boarding was in 5 minutes after we arrived. We had bought our own rolls and meat to eat so we did that on the boar before leaving. The boat ride was amazing. We went past numerous waterfalls coming off the huge mountains. We saw a pod of dolphins which was amazing ans we saw some seals. The cruise took in all of the Sound and had great commentary about different aspects of the sound. The tour was over so quickly and we were very dissapoited as it meant we had to head home.
They way back involved a few stops too. We made a stop at The Chasm. This turend out to be a 15minutes return walk through a rainforest with which lead to a huge cascading waterfall in the casmn. Really beautiful and weird to see in the mountainous region we were in. This forest is actually fed by glacier water as were all the waterfalls in Milford Sound.
We also played around with the drone near one of the rivers. Kea birds are meant to come here and the sign suggested they may come if you build a tower out of rocks because they are curious. Well I tried but no kea’s. (I am not sure if this is actually a jemke for tourists) We continued the long drive back to the hotel and had sake barfor dinner. After dinner we went to find the aurora but no luck.
