Milford Sound

We took the remainder of the Southern Scenic highway to Te Anau which is in Fiordland at the South West of the Country. Fiordland is a really amazing area with the majority of it being designated World Heritage Area as is pretty much the whole of the South West of New Zealand. Te Anau is the gateway to Milford Sounds which is said to have the most spectacular scenery in New Zealand.

We took a tour to Milford with Trips n Tramps as we'd met quite a few people with horror stories about crashing on the road from Te Anau to Milford. It's about 140km's long and winds it's way through the Southern Alps passing a lot of avalanche areas so we thought we'd let someone else worry about the driving...

We were really glad to have taken the tour as the guide pointed out all the really stunning things along the way such as the Chasm, Mirror Lakes, Knobs Flat(!), Deer Flat etc. with plenty of opportunity to get out for walks and photographs. We passed the remnants of an avalanche that had occured last week. The road was cleared by now but the snow on either side of the road was 5 metres deep.

When we reached Milford we had a 3 hour boat trip on the Fiordland Navigator out into the sound but by the time we arrived the weather had taken a turn for the worse and it was quite grey and rainy. This just added to the effect though as hundreds of waterfalls began cascading down the mountains. It was really something else to see all these waterfalls because in Milford only 3 waterfalls are permanent and the rest just start flowing when it rains. Unfortunately our 3 hour boat trip had to be cut short when the weather started to get rough as we got closer to the open sea and we had to turn round and go back to port. This didn't really take away from the experience though as Milford was so spectacular that even to have had 2 hours there was amazing. Definitely one of our favourite places so far.