Advertisement
Published: July 17th 2007
Edit Blog Post
I spy a long white cloud - Lake Te Anau
First in a long line of water and mountain photes to come! Kia Ora, readers. I’m last taking a moment to knock up the final blog from our South Island trip of almost 5 months ago now!
From Queenstown we headed down the road to Te Anau, the gateway to the spectacular Fiordland National Park, which is the largest national park in NZ and forms part of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Area as designated by the United Nations. There are 15 fiords in the park and we were there for a day trip to the most famous and the most northerly of them - Milford Sound, New Zealand’s most visited tourist attraction.
Te Anau is a smallish town that straggles along the shores of its eponymous lake and we found a smashing looking caravan park to plonk Buzz in but we later discovered it could do with some investment...and some cleaning. A wee walk to check out the lake was followed by some pasta and chorizo dinner then off to bed to get well rested for our trip.
We were up early like excited school kids and found we had time to kill after a leisurely breakfast. Eventually we worked out which bus we were supposed to be
on and we were off. We got top notch seats second from front row and then looked up and saw that the bus had a largely glass ceiling to maximise your views of the mountains. I remembered my Mum & Dad telling me about that so I figured we must have been with the same company that they went with. I also remember them telling us how amazing the drive was with scenery almost as fantastic as Milford Sound itself. I’m sure you’ll agree from the photos, they were right.
The drive there took over 2 hours mainly because of the numerous stops for photos and boy, did my camera do overtime and then some! It took me a long time to whittle them down to the ones that made it onto this blog. Our driver was a big Maori guy whose names escapes me after 5 months but he was brilliant - his stories were bursting with facts and figures and really made a great trip into a fantastic one.
Once we got to Milford Sound, we were off the bus and straight onto the boat called the Milford Haven - it was the biggest boat so
there was loads of room. However, almost everyone was out on deck and it certainly got quite busy there. It was a beautiful day to be at Milford Sound - warm sunshine and blue skies made for spectacular views all round. What was most amazing was that they were having a drought - Milford Sound averages almost 7 metres of rain every year (yes that’s right - METRES!) but when we went they hadn’t had rain for over 6 weeks.
Milford is still a spectacular place to be when it pours. In fact some argue that it’s better to go when the heavens open because the waterfalls just go ballistic. I suppose the ideal is to just after the rains have stopped and the sun has come out - difficult to time that right though!
Milford Sound is actually poorly named not just because the guy that discovered it named it after his hometown of Milford Haven in Wales, but also because it is a fiord and not a sound. The same goes for the all the 15 sounds - they’re all fiords but for some reason the muppets that named them didn’t pay attention in Geography class.
Mrs Organ wouldn’t have stood for that!
There are a number of wind spots on the fiord (!) where, even although it was a very still day, it blew hard at certain places seemingly out of nowhere which was very strange but typical on the area’s extreme weather patterns.
The boat trip took about 2.5 hours and was well worth the money - overall a fantastic day and probably the highlight of the holiday. I can’t recommend Milford Sound enough and if they ever build the proposed tunnel from Queenstown to Milford Sound it’ll be a crime in my book. Don’t take the short route! The drive from Te Anau is well worth the extra time it takes.
OK, time to go folks - hope you enjoyed the blog and here’s to you all! Next blog will be a quickie on recent Melbourne trips and then hopefully a baby one!!
Cheers,
Angus, Jo-Ann & Bump
Advertisement
Tot: 0.124s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 13; qc: 73; dbt: 0.0896s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb