Cruising the sounds
Trip Start
Aug 17, 2003
1
46
76
Trip End
Jun 04, 2004
Fiordland,
New Zealand
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Day 1 was Milford Sound, and although it is actually only about 70km as the crow flies from Queenstown, there are some rather inconvenient mountains in the way (although they were the ones I was admiring from Glenorchy the other day, so I can't really complain). That means instead a 3-4 hour drive from Queenstown to Milford Sound via Te Anau.
As well as being one of the most untouched areas of New Zealand, it's also one of the wettest, which with the pattern of the last few weeks wasn't very encouraging! But everyone takes great pains to tell you that in the rain Milford Sound is still amazing because of the incredible waterfalls which are created
Doubtful Sound - Kea (Alpine Parrot)
. Nice try.... but it's still wet!!We set off at 7am, in the middle of a rain storm - so I just kept on thinking about those waterfalls.... And in fact we were fairly lucky - it did rain, but it got progressively better through the day, so it was bearable! We had a quick stop off in Te Anau, which was a quite pretty town on the edge of Lake Te Anau (I think the biggest lake in the South Island). And then it was on for the real purpose of our trip.
We stopped off quite a few times to look at various waterfalls, which were absolutely stunning - there was one which came crashing down right by the road, but unfortunately there was no space for a coach to stop, so we just had to grab a glimpse on the way past. There was also an amazing chasm, where the water had worn an incredibly deep drop into the rock as it passed underneath our viewing platform. The power of water really is incredible. The one downside of the waterfalls was when one of the guys managed to drop his camera over one of them - and could then see it sitting on a rock, but it was way to dangerous to try to get it. Slightly muppet like, but he was gutted!
One of the most nerve-racking parts of the journey was the trip through the Homer Tunnel, a tunnel blasted out of the rock (and not reinforced or smoothed off in anyway, unlike tunnels I'm used to in the UK)
Doubtful Sound - view down to Deep Cove
. It is just about wide enough for 2 cars to pass, but not 2 coaches, and there are no lights (either to provide illumination, or traffic lights!) because there's no electricity there. So it's all a bit daunting, as the coach slowly drives through the tunnel with the driver hoping desperately that there won't be a coach coming the other way (as one of them would have to reverse!) We made it through with no problems, and stopped when we reached the other side, to look back at the incredibly big mountain this tiny tunnel was cut through (see picture). Absolutely amazing!Once we got to Milford, we piled onto our boat for the cruise of the sounds. It was still raining, and blowing an absolute gale, but I was determined to get outside and have a proper look around. (I was pretty irritated by the people from my bus who got on the boat, sat around a table with coffees and whinged about how it wasn't really worth the monety to have done the trip - not if you stay inside, no...!) So I got blown around for a while, and then finally the rain stopped and the cloud started to lift and it became more bearable.
Again, there were lots and lots of waterfalls, but they were just incredible - falling from every bit of mountain, and dropping off sheer rock faces in places
Milford looking mysterious
. There were some which were being blown so hard by the strong winds that they were actually "flowing" upwards! It was quite humbling being on such a small boat, on an expanse of water at the foot of such amazingly tall hills. Really incredible. We cruised through the sound right out to the sea, where it started to get a bit bumpy, and then came back in again, into the sun this time, and saw quite a few seals warming themselves on the rocks at the side of the sounds. The clouds had lifted and so the mountains started to show their colours, rather than just all looking very grey and mysterious... It was really beautiful - definitely made it worthwhile in the end, even if we were disappointed to not be able to get the postcard photo that you see everywhere here - of Mitre Peak with blue sky and perfectly reflected in the still waters of the sound. I guess that probably only happens once every couple of years!!!
The next day was a different sound - this time to Doubtful Sound, a little further south from Milford. My uncle had told me that he had been to both sounds and Doubtful was defintitely more beautiful, so I booked the extra trip. But the weather was even worse when I woke up - there was even thunder as I walked into town to meet the bus!
Milford Sound - a break in the clouds!
! But I was being optimistic that hopefully it would get better!Doubtful Sound (so named because Captain Cook didn't enter it because he was doubtful there would be enough wind to be able to sail a ship back out again) is less accessible than Milford, so getting there is an adventure in itself. First is a crossing of Lake Manapouri, also reputed to be absolutely beautiful - only the cloud was so low it was almost impossible to make out the shoreline as we crossed over. Not great.
On the other side of the lake we were met by our coaches, which took us first of all on a visit to West Arm Power Station. Not exactly what I was expecting to be the highlight of the trip, but it was reasonably interesting, as it is built almost entirely underground in order to not disturb the environment. We travelled 2km down an access road which was just blasted out of the mountain again, but being the route to a power station did at least have electricty, unlike the Homer Tunnel. And then we were taken into the machine room. I'm sure there were some people getting very over-excited about the detailed workings of electricity generation, but I have to admit that it wasn't really my bag....
After far too long in the power station, we headed back out into daylight, and headed over the Wilmot Pass to get to Deep Cove, where our cruise of Doubtful Sound would begin
Mirror Lakes - mountains
. As you might expect from the words low cloud and pass, this was in whiteout. So the views weren't exactly as spectacular as they were supposed to be. Although there were some amazing parts we drove past where the entire side of the road was a curtain of water. Absolutely incredible.By the time we got onto our boat at Doubtful Sound, I was starting to feel slightly irritated that I'd paid loads of money for this trip, and the weather was truly awful for it. But as at Milford, by the time we'd reached the (very rough) opening into the sea and turned around, the weather started to improve, and we could start to at least make out the mountains around the sound.
We turned off the main sound into one of the arms which was amazing - there was one mountain in front of us which must have been covered in at least 100 waterfalls, from all over the place. We went up close to one of the sheer cliffs which drop into the water, and could see the over hangs and gullies cut by the water. In one place it looked as if the water just poured out from the middle of the rock, half way down the cliff, as the water had carved a route inside the cliff. What was also incredible was the vegetation which was managing somehow to cling to the sheer rock faces - even trees were growing there
Waterfalls - 1
!As we turned back out into the main sound, we also saw about 3 bottlenosed dolphins, swimming alongside the boat. It was fantastic to watch them.
I was starting to feel slightly happier about the trip as the weather improved, and having seen the dolphins, and that just continued. As we went back over the pass, the cloud had lifted so you could see the sound - and in many ways the mist actually made it look more beautiful because it added a bit of mystique. And as we started to board our boat back across Lake Manapouri, we saw a kea, a native NZ alpine parrot. I think it's the only alpine parrot in the world, and it certainly seemed out of place. It was very cool to see!
The weather crossing back over Lake Manapouri was great - finally the clouds had pulled back so far that we could see the mountains - unsurprisingly snow-capped again after all the rain. It was spectacular.
