As far south as we go

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Hello!

After Queenstown we drove a couple hours south to Te Anau, a lovely wee town on the edge of Fiordland, NZ's biggest national park and home to lots of wild forest, spectacular mountains and beautiful fiords. Te Anau is the base for walking some of NZ's 'great walks', including the 4 day Milford Track, but they aren't so much fun in winter (due to ice, snow, torrential rain, the Department of Conservation removing some of the bridges during winter - small details!) so we used it as a base to visit the world famous Milford Sound.

Milford Sound is a spectacular fiord (carved by glaciers) that leads out to the Tasman Sea and is reached by a very windy, twisty (and icy at this time of year) mountain road. We opted to go by bus rather than get our car stuck, so after a 2 1/2 hour coach jouney we reached Milford for our 3 hour cruise and visit to the underwater observatory. Milford Sound was every bit as spectacular as we hoped it would be, especially since it was a clear sunny day when we visited. The underwater observatory was also fantastic - they've sunk what is essentially a big glass tube 9 metres underwater and you can observe marine life from inside it. What is really cool (I'm told) is that Milford has some species of sea-life normally only found in really deep oceans, and not normally seen by many people, so this was a great opportunity. I liked watching the fishes swimming past and the star-fish on the rocks! As well as underwater wildlife, we had a pod of bottlenose dolphons swimming with us, and we saw a NZ fur seal basking on the rocks - very cute.

Our fantastic day in Milford was followed by a few quiet days in Te Anau, doing some wee walks, and generally chilling out. We left Te Anau on Friday and headed for Invercargill - right on NZ's south coast. On the way we picked up our second hitch-hiker, a girl from San Fransisco who's hitching her way round the south island (it's surprisingly popular here and seems to be safe), so we had an interesting journey. There's not much to say about Invercargill - the town was so exciting that we went to the pictures on Friday night then left again the next morning... We did however drive to Bluff, which is a wee industrial town on a peninsula south of Invercargill, where there is one of those cheesy signposts telling you how far it is to different parts of the world. Of course we took photos!!

This is going to turn into a huge blog, so I'll finish it in a few days - by then we might have lots more exciting photos for it :-)

Hope you're all well!

love Jo and Graeme x

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Comments

[Kay Kay I]

I love the picture of the dolphine