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Published: August 26th 2006
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Milford Sound……
Milford Sound was awesome. I can’t really do it justice in writing, it is such a special place to go and see. Someone described it as being similar to a landscape like that from Jurassic Park……quite true! It was beautiful. We stayed at a place called Te Anau the night before we set off for Milford Sound and it was a pleasant little place, with the usual assortment of random looking pub’s, shops and places to stay. We stayed at a really well looked after campsite which even had under-floor heating in the toilets which was a bonus.
We set off for Milford with fog, lots of fog. It didn’t look good but luckily it cleared a couple of hours after we had set off to catch our boat trip which left at midday. The drive there was really scenic, loads to see as we went along. We couldn’t stop at too many places as we had to be there at a specific time so we just had time to stop at the Mirror Lakes….which as you can guess is a collection of lake’s which acts as a mirror! Quite impressive though as you can see all
Milford Sound
The beauty of this place is breathtaking! the mountains in the lake’s, so we took hundreds of pictures, as always, and got back on the road to Milford Sound.
It was quite a dangerous drive as loads of snow was being cleared off the road by large intimidating diggers, well there were when all you see when driving in England is the occasional tractor and JCB. Anyway, we couldn’t stop for quite a few km’s due to it being an avalanche zone! Never driven through one of them before, good to scare yourself. We also drove through this freaky tunnel called the Hommer Tunnel….weird name cause I didn’t see any empty Duff can’s around….(not funny, I apologise)..!! We arrived in good time and had a drink before we made our way down to the dock and to our boat which was called the Fiordland Navigator, cool name…I doubt they actually do much ‘navigating’ seeing as they do the same trips all day every day but it sounded impressive. We got a free cup of tea onboard as well, great to get anything free when your backpacking so I had a couple of cup’s….think I went a bit overboard as I had five cups! The trip was
fantastic, saw waterfalls, wildlife and as the sea was calm we were able to go out of the Fiord and onto the Tasman for a bit. As it was a nature cruise we got to see loads more and learnt more about what we were seeing, we had a lady on board talking to us so it felt more personal…..she also spied me lunging on the deck which was funny! Think she made some random comment like… “well, we have someone on the deck at the front working it, yeah nice move’s”…or something to that effect! She thought she was funny, she wasn’t. I thought I looked cool by lunging, I wasn’t.
We were on the way back to the port when something rather special happened, we encountered some dolphins! The captain sailed close to them so we could get a good look and as we left them, they decided to follow us and swim with the bow of the boat which was so good, quite luck as it only happened about once a week so that was sweet. All in all, a great trip to a wonderful place, somewhere I would definitely go back to. We had to
Lunge on the boat 2...!
Lunge...again! I'm smiling because the guide had just announced over the loudspeeker about my lunging! move on though and Invercargill was our next stop. I had to go some as it was quite a way from Milford but we managed to make it before the camp office closed. Awesome little campsite which was really cosy, we stayed here for two nights. Went to the Southland museum the following day which was surprisingly good and free! We had it almost all to ourselves as well which was nice, bit of space to look around all that was on display. We also managed to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 when we were here which was good, and so cheap! Cinema over here is dirt cheap compared to what they charge in England, popcorn is fantastically cheap too so we had loads!
From Invercargill we moved on further south to a place called Bluff which is a small settlement right at the bottom of the south island and has one of those signs with London, Tokyo, LA and many other cities on, just to show you how far away everything is! It was a miserable day and so we didn’t stay in Bluff too long, took some snaps and went on a walk to some rocks
which I lunged on and that was about it!
Next up is the Catlins, a beautiful part of the south island which rarely gets visited so will tell you more in the next blog…..!
Take care, and as always, look after yourselves.
Peace, love and rock ‘n roll
Ginge
P.S…..Shomy, thanks for your message, much appreciated….as was yours howsey! Cheers!
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lee Carpenter
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lunges
Dear Adam, Still having fun then on your world tour. Liked the pics of Milford Sound, stunning. Also laughed at the lunges!! Hope you're having great time. Lots of love, Lee, Steven, tom and Soph