Milford Sound

What our hostel looked out over in Te Anau...now imagine the deer sounds... 

(photo credit: phil)

Some of the gang on day 2 of the cruise...yeah this is what Fiordland weather usually is...

(photo credit: zoe)

Mirror Lakes, along the Road

(photo credit: phil)

Right before the Homer Tunnel

(photo credit: zoe)

Along the Rd...I think this was called Eglinton Valley?

(photo credit: zoe)

Along the rd

(photo credit: phil)

Milford Sound entrance

(photo credit:phil)

A little note: I know these are long, I don't expect anyone to want to read this much detail about my trip. I didn't keep a journal for myself while down there, and don't have the usual breadcrumb-trail of pictures to reconstruct my trip, so this is as much for myself as for you guys

April 10th-11th: Milford Sound

On  the morning of the 10th, I met up with the big group (12 people!) of my friends in Te Anau and we promptly headed down the Milford Rd to Milford Sound, where we were to catch our overnight cruise at 4:30pm. 

Milford Rd had got to me one of THE most gorgeous (there's that word again...) strips of road in the world. It basically traverses an old glacial valley, which was really, really cool from a North American geologist's perspective b/c it was like how places like the Adirondacks must've looked before they were eroded to what they are today. We had really nice weather for this day too. It was also an amazing piece of construction towards the end, as they cut a tunnel through a mountain (it was scary, it went at about a 30 degree angle down!) and then there were tons of switchbacks as we approached the sound.

As my friend Phil captioned one of his photos, words really cannot describe this place. Thats his photos and my friend Zoe's photos at the beginning of the post...didn't know how to move them around within the body of the blog haha.

We got on the boat, which had about a dozen 4-bed bunks and a nice big kitchen/sitting area...if I could estimate size I'd give you a length. The boat basically went halfway seaward and then moored for the night's activities, which ranged from kayaking and swimming (for crazies I travel with, who wanted to freeze themselves to death :-P) or a little naturalist tour on a tendercraft (the sane/warm option), followed by a delicious pork roast and potatoes and apple crumbcake. I spent the rest of the evening just hanging out outside on the boat, watching the fish jump and the bioluminescent arthropods (I think, they were too big/mobile to be algae...) and constantly being shocked by the utter silence of the place.

The next day we all woke up for dawn, but instead it was just really rainy, which sounds lame, but considering the amount if rainfall they get on the west coast of the South Island, this was more typical. It also brought out the other character of Milford Sound, foggy with tons of waterfalls coming into it seemingly out of nowhere. We reached the Tasman Sea and then headed back, seeing some seals along the way. I took the side-trip to the underwater observatory, the deepest in the world and the best non-diving way to see the unique underwater habitat in Fiordland: basically the sheer amount of rainfall/meltwater churns up alot of sediment, which creates this opaque freshwater lenses at the top of the water column there, which blocks sunlight and therefore fools deeper-sea animals (like black coral) to live closer to the surface than normal. Here's the thing though: because I don't really know Pacific fishes, it didn't immediately come off as that spectacular; also, black coral isn't really black, its white. In other words, cool to think about seeing things from 100m deep,but not all that cool to actually see.

Went back to Te Anau, where we stayed in an adorable little hostel on a deer farm that overlooked the Kepler mountains. Red deer make really funny noises btw...think Wookie-like. In fact, I think that is what prompted me to have a scary, scary dream about a race of halfman-halfbear people escaping from the Bronx Zoo and terrorizing the entire tri-state area! 

We basically spent the whole day/night preparing and shopping for the 4-day Great Walk, the Kepler track, that we were to start the next day....