3rd January
It sounds a bit mad, seeing as I have a camper/car, but I booked a trip to Milford Sound, which includes lunch & a cruise.
The reason being that it takes so long to get there & back - 4 hours each way - and there's only one route via Te Anau.
It turned out to be a good decision in the end, as the cruise is the only way to see it properly & I would have still had to pay for that, plus camping & petrol, so was definitely worth it.
Plus I could sit back and enjoy the scenery. The coach was pretty cool as it had a glass roof so you could see the mountains above!
We drove into the Fiordland National Park which was beautiful.
I sat next to a lady from Sydney called Dareen. She was nice. Lebanese parents but lived in Sydney since she was 13. Her accent was kinda fast & mumbley so I struggled to understand her sometimes.
The tour guide, Peter was from Czech Republic, settled in New Zealand & he was funny, he certainly fancied himself as a comedian. I'm sure he was making most of the stuff up too ..... he did say meteorolgists were the second biggest liars after politicians, as he was talking about the weather forecast. He said the third biggest liars were tour guides, so there you go.
The weather was a bit cloudy before we got to the tunnel, but over the other side it was beautiful & sunny.
At Milford Sound - which is actually a fiord since it was shaped by a glacier not a river, as a Sound is - we got on our boat for a two hour cruise up & down the fiord.....it did blow me away. ...I had been thinking I'd seen some pretty wonderful scenery, and was sceptical at how beautiful this place could be, but it didn't disappoint! It has been named the '8th Wonder of the World.'
It's difficult to comprehend the power of a glacier...the shear weight of ice, carving & shaping the rock. On this picture, the horizontal gouges are where a boulder has been swept along by the glacier & carved out gashes in the rock!
So after that a sleepy ride back on the coach where I finished my packed lunch provided
Then a bit of a wander round Queenstown before heading back to the campsite
.....probably a New Zealand pest, but he was very cute.
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