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An extraordinary day in Milford Sound.
It rains on average 28 days per month in Milford Sound and we got blue skys!We were feeling energised by our very succesful walk and we decided to turn our planned rest days into action. Our next stop was the highly renowned Milford Sound, the only road-accessible fjord in New Zealand's "fjordland". The fact that it's the only road-accessible one might give you an impression how undeveloped New Zealand actually is - and I'm 100% in favour of keeping it that way.
It was a long drive from Queenstown around in a huge loop back to and past a place we'd been only a couple of days before during our walk. After 4 hours' driving we passed "The Divide", only about 30kms as the crow flies from where we started our walk - but about 300kms by road! We were entering a place with one of the highest annual rainfalls in the world - it's something like 8 metres per year, almost as much as Rochdale.
Not complaining too much about the rain we pressed on and found a DOC campsite by a lake to stop for the night. In the morning the rain had stopped and we were in for a couple of days' glorious weather.
The road into Milford (the settlement on the sound)
The Chasm
Lovely waterfalls and unusual roack formations. took us past the Chasm, a gorgeous set of little waterfalls which have carved out the bedrock into some really cool formations.
We also passed through the Homer Tunnel, which was carved out under constant threat of avalanche, down through the rock to where it meets an incredibly steep and bendy road which winds down into Milford. That afternoon we booked ourselves onto a diving trip into the Sound - the main reason we were there.
Diving on the Sound Early in the morning we were picked up by our two cheerful and charismatic divemasters who took us out into the Sound on a speedboat. We did our first dive, had some soup, and then did the second dive.
There is all sorts of life in the Sound that would not normally be encountered at such shallow depths. You can imagine all sorts of big-eyed fish and Black Coral which are all normally found at much greater depths than we could dive to. The reason for all of this is the geography of the area - the very high, steep and narrow rock mountains create the fjord itself and also cause the very high rainfall as the weather patterns
From the shore
Perfect calm on Milford Sound of the Tasman Sea hit land. The rainfall in turn runs off the steep mountainsides into the fjord almost instantly - the world's highest waterfall is actually in Milford Sound but it is only a waterfall while it's raining so doesn't beat Angel Falls (apparently). The huge amounts of fresh water that fall into the sound actually cause a permanent layer of fresh water (up to 16 metres thick) to form over the seawater in the fjord. This freshwater layer is a muddy brown colour from the tannin in the mountainsides - which means that it is much darker in the seawater beneath than it would normally be, allowing the deep-sea creatures to be fooled into thinking they are at greater depth. I hope that explanation was useful and accurate!
The next few days were spent working on the van whilst driving to Invercargil and then onto Christchurch so go to the next article if you want to read about that!
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