Milford Sound

Wednesday, Nov 10, 2009

We awoke today to a gorgeous, clear blue sky, and looking straight out the back window of our van, we could see the mountains in the distance. We deliberately camped at a holiday park on the north side of Te Anau because we wanted to get an early jump on getting up to Milford Sound. The estimated time for traveling the 120km to Milford is 2 hours, and the light was beautiful and the mountains spectacular and we could not help but to keep stopping to take photos, so our drive took a little longer. This place is truly astonishing. The drive to the Sound is so spectacular, you begin to think you can't possibly absorb any more beauty and then you get to the actual Sound and it's just breathtaking.

Our cruise of the Sound was terrific. Our guide did a nice job of explaining things and describing what we were seeing, and he had a pretty funny spiel that was humorous and kind of corny, but not annoyingly so. Being on the water, moving between the massive snowcapped fiords was just amazing. We cruised the entire length of the Sound and turned around once we entered the Tasman Sea, about 2 hours in total. The weather was really nice, clear and sunny. It's nice being here before high season - the boat wasn't even a quarter full. There was no jostling for a good spot at the rail. Everyone was able to move around easily and get the photos they wanted because there was never anything remotely like a crowd.

The water in New Zealand is an incredibly shade of turquoise - really indescribable. And clear. At one point during the cruise I began to notice something in the way the light was hitting the water. As the waves would begin to swell away from us, the light would hit them in such a way as to cause the back of the swells to flash purple. Extremely cool.

It seems that every day we are racing the clock to get to our next campsite before it's completely dark. We squeeze every minute out of a day in the place we're at, which means we pull in to the next place, get plugged in around 8 or 9pm, get dinner, set up the beds and crash. Seems like if we could just get going earlier in the morning, we wouldn't have the late day rush, but it probably wouldn't work anyway, because we'd still push the boundaries of how late we could stay in any given location and still pull into camp late. We would just be more exhausted.