Milford Sound - Night 97

My bus for the Milford Sound left the Pinewood Resort at 8:00. We wove around town to various hostels and hotels, eventually filling the bus with daytrippers (not the Beatles’ kind). The Milford Sound is not all that far from Queenstown, as the crow flies, however jagged peaks, retreating glaciers and Lake Wakatipu all stand in the way. Thus the actual drive to the Sound takes almost five hours. The journey took us through the small town of Te Anau, where I’ll be disembarking on the way back through for my three day Kepler Track hike. Along the way we crossed through miles and miles of farm land, all harboring the famous New Zealand sheep. It was here that I saw my first live black sheep. I don’t know if he was just particularly dirty or what, but his wool was nearly as dark as night.

Mitre Peak

In Te Anau we stopped for a brunch/bathroom

On e of Many Waterfalls

break and were back underway by 10:45. Shortly after leaving Te Anau we entered the Fjordlands World Heritage Area, 3 million acres of relatively untouched 6,000 mountains and temperate rain forest. The drive took us up the Elington Valley, a wide flat river plain. The valley itself is relatively new, geologically speaking, and still bears remnant glacial scars such as striations and drumlins from the last ice age. Soon we came upon the Homer Saddle, a

The Homer Tunnel

sheer 3,000 rock wall topped with snowfields. Back in the 1920s an engineer by the name of Homer (his surname) had the bright idea of tunneling through this massive slab of granite and gneiss. The 1930s brought the depression and suddenly, with FDR/New Deal fervor, the New Zealand government pumped money into infrastructure projects to put the unemployed men back to work and as a result work on the Homer Tunnel commenced. A few cave-ins and a World War later it was finally completed in 1953, paving the way for vehicular traffic to the Milford Sound. The rock is so hard here that the tunnel is not capped with concrete, it is simply a 1.5 kilometer, 3.8 meter high hole in the mountain.

Exiting the tunnel you can literally feel the air get warmer and moister; we were now in the rain forest. Twenty minutes later the sound came into view. Simply breathtaking. It wasn’t the perfect sunny day that we had hoped for as a scattering of clouds hung in the sky. As they roll in off the ocean the clouds are brutally ripped to shreds by the sharp mountain peaks giving the whole scene a certain air

On the Boat

of danger and mystique. We boarded the boat and set off on the two-hour trip. Since it had rained hard the last two days, dozens upon dozens of small waterfalls were dumping streams of run-off into the sound from hundreds of feet up. In other areas the rock rises 2,000 feet directly out of the water as vertically straight up as a New York skyscraper (only twice as high). It gives you the strange feeling that the Sound itself is bottomless, that the chasm continues on into the very bowels of the earth. The whole scene, quite frankly, needs to be seen to be believed.

The Milford Sound

The Milford Sound is so long and narrow and receives so much fresh water runoff that the top 10 feet or so is composed of fresh water, which floats on the salt water due to its lower density. The floating freshwater is stained by all the tannins in the soil and leaves a dark sheen to the Sound, known as the Tea effect. After the Cruise everyone hustled back to the bus for the long ride home. I checked into my hostel in Te Anau, made some dinner and packed my bags for my three day hike that begins tomorrow.
What I Learned Today: Sometimes the act of trying to take the perfect photo ruins the actual experience. After snapping off a plethora of photos during the Milford Sound cruise I finally had to just put the camera in my pocket. In trying to capture for everyone else exactly what it looked like, I was wasting the experience…so I apologize, but if you want to know you’ll just have to come see it (not that any photo could do the Sound justice anyway).

written by

exumenius on January 15, 2008 from Te Anau, New Zealand

from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos

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