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Published: November 20th 2022
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Sand flies are the devil’s spawn! More on this later….
We had to check out of our motel in Te Anau (as a side note, we’ve discovered we’ve been saying this wrong, it’s pronounced “Tea-Ar-nu”) this morning as we’d not been able to extend our stay by the extra day we needed. We booked another motel, the Amber Court Motel, which is in the next road back for tonight but couldn’t check in until after our day trip to Milford Sound.
It was a very grey, overcast, miserable morning and unlike other days which have looked the same as this but been surprisingly warm, it was also very cold! We met the coach just after 10am, and set off down the road we’d had a sneaky peak of yesterday. It was nice to be able to see out from the coach, being higher up meant we could see over some of the bushes and tree’s at the side of the road.
There was a stop at the Mirror Lakes, which was exactly the same as we’d seen it the day before, not mirror like at all! We only had one other stop (I won’t include the toilet stop!)
which was a bridge over the Tutoko River, this was much better but we only had enough time to quickly snap a few pictures then it was back on the coach.
The driver did give us a few facts while driving us along, and where possible, he’d slow right down to allow us to try to get a few pictures through the rain drop coated windows while trying not to just capture our own reflections in the glass!
About 2 and a half hours later, we got to the Milford Sound parking area, and headed into the terminal building to catch the boat. Once we’d left what we hadn’t realised at this point was the safe haven of the terminal building, we were immediately swarmed by sand flies! It was like being stuck in a black cloud of bugs, and everyone was swatting the air around them in a desperate attempt to prevent being eaten alive. It took ages for them to let us onto the boat, but once we were on, thankfully we were once again out of danger.
The boat trip was incredible, almost worth the sand fly trauma, we were lucky enough to be
accompanied on the first part of the trip by a small pod of southern bottle nose dolphins. They were unlike dolphins we’d seen before, they were massive! Their backs were two shades of grey, the sides were one shade, with a thick line down their backs of another shade.
As we reached the mouth of Milford Sound, where it met the sea, we also saw some penguins leaping out of the water. Then spotted a shark fin in the distance, and some juvenile fur seals sprawled out on a rock.
In addition to the wildlife, the scenery was incredible. We passed by the kissing turtles, which is a rock formation just near the sea end, and it really did look like turtles with their heads together. The height of the surrounding mountains was immense, it was hard to comprehend how big everything was until you saw one of the other large tour boats dwarfed by them. The waterfalls were breathtaking, hopefully we managed to capture some of these things in the photo’s.
The 2 hour trip flew by, and we rushed back into the terminal to avoid the flies, then back onto our coach. There were no
stops on the way back, so we arrived back just after 5pm. Feel for the people who took the trip from Queenstown, they had another 2.5hrs to travel to get to their final destination!
After stopping off for a much needed beer, we’re now settled in our new motel, it’s not quite as nice as the last one, our view is of the car park! But it’s fine for what we need and they have a massive stack of DVD’s so our evening viewing is sorted.
We’re moving on to Queenstown tomorrow, which we found out today will be hosting some kind of marathon. Not sure that’ll be a good thing for us getting to the hotel we’ve booked, but it does explain the ridiculously high price we had to pay for the nights stay there!
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