Fjord Transit
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
68
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
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Milford Sound,
South Island,
New Zealand
Friday, February 29, 2008
In our favour though was the fact that the Fiordland (the j-less spelling still rankles rather) is a beautiful and, as such, popular destination, so the main stretch of road leading to Milford has a rapid succession of DOC sites, all of which are close to the road, so we didn't have to play a rainy midnight game of What The Bloody Hell Do You Mean? We picked the closest one to Milford, found ourselves a place to squeeze the van and turned in for the night.
The following morning, it was chucking it down. Really, apocalyptic, forty days and forty nights sort of rain. The steep winding climb up to the top of the last hill before Milford was as much fun as ever, and then we entered the Homer Tunnel, a single lane, traffic light controlled affair running down what seemed a savage sort of gradient (actually 1:10) for 1270 metres, up which we weren't looking forward to driving on the way out. How the hell would we pull over and cool down in a single lane tunnel?
Down in Milford, which isn't really a town as such - just a dock, car park and tourist information café thing - we dropped off the van, GoreTexed ourselves up to the eyeballs and scurried off to the port building to investigate cruises on the Sound. The fjords here we had heard were quite spectacular, and a variety of cruise boats ply their trade in varying degrees of luxury and refinement up and down the channels. Also, there is an underwater observatory lashed to the rock, which you can visit, but only by boat.
There weren't any spaces on anybody's cruises for a few hours, so we bought tickets for later on and went to sit in the café for a bit and catch up on a bit of writing. We eked out our coffee and disappointing cakes so as not to get kicked out, then realised that such behaviour was largely due to our being British - nobody else was bothering and nobody seemed to mind. We actually spent the majority of our time talking to Anna and Joe, the couple we met in their newly purchased van in the layby outside Raglan on our first night as gypsies. Funny old world.
We swapped van tales. Theirs was behaving better than ours, as far as overheating went, but they had just experienced an absurdly loud bang from somewhere within the engine as they approached Milford, with seemingly no ill effects. They were a touch concerned. At least with overheating you can stop and pour more water into the radiator. Explosions on the other hand, especially unidentified ones, are somewhat harder to rectify.
The rain was ceaseless. We boarded our boat, and set off through the fjord, slurping at the free cups of tea and coffee with which we were provided. Through the windows, it looked pretty impressive, just a shame the weather was so damn horrible. The boat crew ran a commentary as we went, and at some points, people would go and huddle out on the semi-covered rear deck to take photos of the scenery.
Not us.
We were on the upper deck, in the pouring rain, clinging onto the railings against the relentless winds. It felt like it would be criminal not to. Milford Sound is one of the most commanding, spectacular places either of us have seen, ever. The sheer faces of rock with trees clinging on at the most improbable of angles gave such a tangible impression of the tenacious miracle of natural survival. It seemed as though almost anywhere on Earth would have been an easier place for a tree to live.
To be fair, there were a number of scars on the rock resulting from a tree having given up and fallen, dragging the interlinked root network and, consequently, its brethren with it. The weather was actually a blessing. There are hundreds of waterfalls in the sound, the majority of which are temporary, but in such heavy rain they were all in full flow, and quite majestic.
Milford Sound gets a lot of rain. The weather systems out in the Tasman Sea blow uninterrupted onto western New Zealand, but here they get channelled up through the fjords, hit the towering walls of rock where everything condenses and they drop all their rain on Milford. The average rainfall is between six and nine metres per year. That's metres. Most of it seemed to fall when we were there. Sort of what you'd expect for somewhere named after a town on the Welsh coast really. As it happens, the river which runs down into the fjords is the Cleddau; Milford Haven in Wales after which the place is named is also fed by the Cleddau. They also have a Pembroke Glacier, whereas Milford Haven only has Pembroke County Council.
Speaking of names, chances are there will be some geographers reading this. So, for their benefit, Milford Sound cannot, of course, be both a sound and a fjord. It's a fjord, a steep sided glacial valley now filled by the sea. Sounds are wider and tend to be carved out by rivers and then flooded by the sea. There are apparently a lot of fjords misnamed as sounds, as intrepid explorers cannot be relied upon to know anything about glacial valleys.
Despite the huge amount of rain they experience, the boat crew were quite stunned by just how wet it was that day. The Captain had never seen the waterfalls running with quite such force - we felt quite privileged. We saw a few dolphins and seals, which obviously isn't something they can schedule, and then turned back. The Captain wasn't prepared to go out into the more open channels in those sorts of conditions, which was fair enough really.
We stopped at the underwater observatory on the way back. Designed by Arthur Tyndall, who allowed the plans to be distributed without copyright to allow the development of other underwater observatories worldwide, the Milford Deep Underwater Observatory is a viewing area located 10.4 metres below the water. The upper deck of the structure is bolted to the rockface of Harrison's Cove, beneath Pembroke Glacier and the observation capsule is suspended from it. Outside the windows are 'window boxes', in which corals grow and fish, starfish and other species hang out. These can be raised and lowered on cables to protect the sensitive species, depending on water conditions, currents and the like. The viewing capsule feels a little unusual: it's strange to be the one inside the fish bowl for a change, with the outside underwater world looking in at you.
Milford Sound has a unique feature in terms of the marine life that it supports. Species that are usually found at forty metres and below are found happily surviving at just eight metres depth. The reason for this is that the upper, freshwater layer of the Sound (freshwater sits on top of the denser saltwater) runs down through the vegetation which clings to the cliffs, getting infused and therefore darkened with natural tannins as it goes. It's still 'clean' water - it doesn't pick up any silt, but it becomes, essentially, tea. Really stewed tea. This blots out a lot of light, leading to similar environmental conditions as would normally be found at much greater depth. Consequently, there are deep water species such as black and red corals, which it would not usually be possible to see without some heavy duty diving qualifications.
We found the place fascinating, and tried to talk the guys there into giving us jobs. A zoologist and a diver? Go on, you'll always need zoologists and divers. He seemed to agree, so maybe...
We were allowed to stay as long as we wanted - the arrangement is that you pay when you buy your cruise ticket, you can pay a bit extra to be allowed into the viewing capsule, then you get on whichever boat happens to be passing - regardless of which company is operating it - when you want to leave. They're along every half hour or so. We stuck around for about an hour, but then they wanted to close.
They had to close earlier than usual because of the excessive rainfall. The stained freshwater layer was rapidly gaining volume and was pushing the saltwater layer down, potentially exposing the deep-sea species to freshwater, which would have killed them. The 'window boxes' needed to be lowered down into safer waters, so they had to shut up shop for the day.
The boat we caught back was much bigger and a bit fancier than the one on which we had gone out. Part of the increased fanciness involved having a restaurant. A restaurant which was selling off its sandwiches and hot soup on the cheap as it was the last boat of the day. So, filled with butties and steaming hot soup (just about perfect after standing out on the deck in a storm), we arrived back on damp land.
Kirsty bought postcards, as despite the spectacular photo opportunities we had been exploiting for the past few hours, the famous views of blue-skied craggy mountains reflected in glassy waters had been a little elusive.
We topped up the radiator and set off on the climb. Just before the bottom of the Homer Tunnel, we pulled over and waited for about half an hour to cool right down, so as to be able to start off at a sensible temperature.
We reached the traffic lights, which were unfortunately on red - a flying start would have been nice - with nobody ahead of us. That, at least, was an advantage. We had been dreading getting stuck behind a bus or trilby wearing dodderer. Oddly enough, the tunnel seemed a lot shorter than it had been on the way down, and we topped out before the gauge was even close to half way. As we'd been saying all along, it's the bends that do it. Get a clear run, keep it in a happy gear with your foot down - no worries.
So, as we left the rainy splendour behind us, we looked forward to seeing a lot more of what had seemed like a very nice town during the previous day's flying visit. Queenstown here we come.
