Waterfalls...

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Driving down to Milford SOund we encountered some of the most amazing scenes of nature. Looking up at the mountains from Queenstown, they had these constant swirling, rolling clouds passing over and by them. The clouds seemed to float somewhere halfway between the earth and the sky. One cloud mass stretched half way across the landscape in an elongated triangle. Mind you we are in what the Mauri call Aoteapoa, or "Land of the Long White Cloud".

As we came nearer Milford Sound from Te Anau, due to the heavy rain of the day we saw the waterfalls and flowing rivers in abundance. At one stage the road flows this gushing, heaving river which because of the downpour just seemed to be made of foam, nearly aqua blue in colour rather than the expected white, probably from the forest greenery around it. Passing over a tiny little bridge at Falls Creek, I was so busy looking right at the river I nearly didn't look left and see this thundering waterfall about a metre from me.

Continuing up the mountainous road we hurtle head on into the Homer Tunnel, a low ceilinged, barely two lane wide, only lit by reflection lights tunnel. "Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God", puncuated by "this is avalance area", is all I heard from one end of the tunnel to the next. This combined with Irene leaning so far over the steering wheel that her nose was nearly on the windscreen leads me to believe she doesn't like tunnels! .

We arrived out at the top of a circle of mountains with waterdalls cascading down all sides to the chasm below, as we wound our way down the sides you literally felt the heavens were open above you. This misty cloudy wonderland split by occasional rays of light and tiny patches of blue sky. Mind you the signs warning it was avalance area combined with Irene being convinced that we were about to become a scene in a horror movie tempered the wonder a bit!

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