Milford Sound

Day 184 – Queenstown, New Zealand

Milford Sound! The name evokes vistas, paintings, famous hiking trails… So it seems a little tame to take a bus all the way to the boat that will take tourists on the sound and then back on the bus… but unless walking there is you life dream, that’s the way to do it.

As always, the bus makes numerous stops at points of interests and rest stops -sometimes they also double up. That’s why when you go see the picture in the gallery, the first will be of numerous things that are not Milford Sound.

There is Mackay Creek, with plenty of lupin flowers.

Mackay Creek

There are the Mirror Lakes.

Mirror Lakes

(And Hollyford Valley, with the Hollyford River, of which Falls Creek is an affluent, Ocean Peak visible at the end of the Hollyford Valley, random mountains whose name I don’t know, and my favorites, waterfalls that cascade down cliffs in white streaks.)

Waterfalls

I mostly don’t know which mountain is which, so your guess is as good as mine!

But finally, we arrived in Milford, the town at the end of the Sound, where we boarded our boat, the Maiden of Milford. We had been lucky with the weather so far, and on board, we alternated sunshine, rain, strong winds, no wind (also I suspect that at this point the wind was cancelled by the speed of the boat), just cloudy weather. Well, it all depends on where in the Sound we are, going in which direction, and so on.

Milford Sound

In the Sound itself, there are famous peaks, like Mitre Peak, named after its shape, like a bishop’s hat, there are waterfalls, there are giant steps that are marks left by previous glaciers, there are seals… so many things! There are also the occasional cruise ship passing by, but unable to anchor since the fjord is around 2 km deep. (You would need a very long chain.) The clouds are caught in the peaks. You understand better why the country is called the Land of the Long White Cloud. The Sound opens into the Tasman Sea.

So, basically, around 9 hours sitting in a bus to get to and fro an hour and a half of cruise.

(And since there are many tours doing the same thing, you leapfrog the same buses over and over during the trip! You don’t leapfrog the boats because they seem to leave the quay at set intervals, you follow the previous one, one follows you, and you see on the other side of the Sound the boats coming back to the harbour… it’s like a merry-go-round.)

We got some nasty weather coming back to Queenstown, hail and thunderstorm, some flooding on the road, but we got back safely and we avoided the rain at our arrival.