A visit to Milford Sound

Day three in New Zealand sees me using the travel pass from Inter-City to travel to Milford Sound via Te Paua, which is a 5hr journey each way!! The trip has no cost although the cruise from Milford Sound does end up costing an extra $90 due to it not being part of the same company… oh well… Budget spirals so will need to be careful next month ;)
Travelling towards Milford Sound the landscape is one of pre-historic wonder as we travel along the sides of U-shaped valleys carved out by vast glaciers of the past - the valleys themselves contain HUGE moraines at times, which the bus has to traverse and it is not until you start driving over them that you understand the shear scale and power of the moving ice. Millions of tons of ground up debris has been carved, carried and deposited within each valley. Great lakes have then filled the low lying areas and stretch as far as the eye can see - Lake Te Paua is the largest lake in Southern New Zealand and is an impressive site.
Continuing down the road built to open up the area by the government in the 1930’s and only completed via connecting tunnel in the 1950’s it is amazing to see shear cliffs either side with perfect examples of hanging valleys - it is like driving through the pictures in a Geography textbook J The looming peaks of the region were a barrier to Milford Sound and so the engineers blew a tunnel directly through the mountainside to the enclosed valley above the sound (the tunnel is very narrow and therefore traffic only goes one way every 15mins controlled by a set of traffic signals). As we exit the tunnel the site before you is stunning - a spaghetti of tarmac lopes its way down into a bowl shaped valley with woodlands taking prominence as you descend - an awesome driving road if a little short. There is also a welcoming committee of a Kea (large, inquisitive green parrot like bird) which is on the look out for food!!
Our coach descends the spaghetti highway downhill to a parking area where you have a 15min walk to see a hollow carved into the rock by a small river named ‘The Chasm’… ok… but there are sand flies about and they bite!!

Milford Sound turns out to be a small hotel/shop and cruise ship terminal (that’s it 0_0) so not a lot to do here other than take in the glorious scenery on a cloudless sunny day. I decide to pay up and join the cruise…
The skipper and guide on board are outstanding and take the ship in very close to the edges of the fjords as we travel out to the Tasman Sea. We are at the northern extent of Fiordland (should be Fjordland but clearly they clearly wanted a unique name!). Milford Sound is also not a sound, a sound being a river valley flooded by the sea and therefore having a V-shape… This is in fact a Fjord due to the nature of the U-shaped glacial valley. The landscape here once again is stunning with the sun overhead illuminating great towering valley walls/cliff faces which show off there volcanic nature through a rich vein on minerals including iron and copper. There are also a number of small waterfalls one of which drops form the nose of an elephant (look closely you may be able to make him out ;)) which in turn is the end of a hanging valley with U-shaped features demonstrating that it too was carved by glacial processes. The scenery drifts serenely past as we all stare in wonder at the grand scale of the surrounding mountains…
This is not the only wonder that we see - there is also a pod of dolphins present and as we approach they put on quite a show swimming towards the boat for a look and then jumping out of the water and doing summersaults - simply beautiful. As quickly as they came they are gone again but it is a memory which will endure the ages :) Later in the cruise we also get to see and smell Fur Seals basking on the rocks who seem utterly unperturbed by a large vessel pulling up beside them!!
All too soon it is time to make our way back to Milford Sound and the return coach trip back to Queenstown (5 hours away 0_0) but I leave with a number of memories that I will not forget and another reason to come back to New Zealand on a more permanent basis…