Milford Sound

---

The drive to Milford Sound is suposed to be one of the most beautiful drives in New Zealand. Milford Sound is actually a fjord, created by a glacier moving to the sea, and not a sopund which is a flooded valley, it was just wrongly classified by the first exploer that discovered it.
It is the wettest place in New Zealand and one of the wettest in the world, receiveing about 7m of rain a year.
We saw it in one of these lovely rainy periods.. The fjord streches about 15m inland and the sheer rock faces rises about 1,200m on either side so with a lot of rain this creates a lot of waterfalls!
We took a boat ride into the sound but unfortunately because of the rain we didn't get to see all that much of it... The cloud was so low as you can see from the pics. The waterfalls, or what we could see of them, were really impressive though and because the wind was so strong a lot of them were being blown away before actually having time for the water to fall.
Mitre Peak is the highest peak and a v famous sight, we didn't get to see all that much of it, but from the photos I have sen it would be really impressive on a clear day.
The boat ride lasted about 1hr 45mins and after about an hour and a half the skies cleared and for the last 15mins we could actually go out onto the roof of the boat! It would have been ideal if it had cleared just a half an hour earlier.. At least we got clear skies to see the drive back though. We made lots of stops for photos and passed lots of glaciers, a few pretty lakes etc.

At the time it was v annying not being able to see much of the actually sound because of the cloud but then this is how it is for the majority of the year so I can't really complain too much and the sheer number of waterfalls was a really good sight.

---

Comments

[Andy]

Hi Claire
I miss u............................ you're look fat but still sexy, n still happy... tell us (Pattiro Solo) when you back to England...