We had traveled about 2 hours south of Queenstown for the night and stayed in a converted shed behind a hotel in a small town of Mossburn. It had 2 bedrooms with 2 bunks in each room and a bathroom. Pretty basic, but filled the need. The hotel provided a complimentary breakfast. We awoke to clouds, and had about a 3 hour drive to Milford Sound. It is a dead end road, but the trip was breathtaking. Mossburn is on the eastern side of the island, and we had to climb over a pass to drop into the Sound, which is on the western side. There are completely different weather patterns on each side. We had hoped for a sunny day here, with all the cliffs, but that was not to be. The area that Milford Sound is in is called Fjiordland, and it really is. Very much like what I would imagine Norway is like.
As we went over the pass and began our descent into Milford Sound, it began raining on us. It had already rained most of the night and morning. So we got a totally different view of Milford Sound. The land with a thousand waterfalls. Hopefully my photos can give you some appreciation for what we saw.
It rains so much here, that the community doesn't even store their water, or provide any water purification. They just have a pipe in the middle of a stream that is always a waterfall. The yearly rainfall is 252 inches, and it can easily rain 10 inches a day.
We took a tourboat through the sound out to the entrance to the Tasman Sea and back.
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| Beginning the descent into Milford Sound |
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| First of many waterfalls |
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| The whole gang. Wet, but not too cold. |
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| Our charter. It is a JUCY boat, like the rental vans... |
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| The harbor. |
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| The waterfall/water source. |
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| The boat in the distance gives a feel for the size of the waterfalls |
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| Haapy tourists. Dry on the inside. |
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| Some like it in the warm boat better. |
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| Clouds lifted for a while near the mouth of the Sound. |
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| The Tasman Sea in the distance. |
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| Just enjoying the silly tourists taking photos of us.... |
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| Captain had just driven the bow of the boat into that waterfall. |
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| The humid outflow wind made breathing hard. |
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| Kea Birds, they don't fly. But they like a handout. |
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| This raging river is caused by the rain. |
This was New Year's Eve. So we stopped in the town of Te Anau for our New Year's dinner feast since we had only packed a lunch for the trip. We found a pie shop that had just closed, but they offered to sell us their unsold pies. So we bought several, each a different flavor for dinner. Now you have to understand that these New Zealand pies are meat pies. Kind of like Swanson frozen chicken pot pie. We tried venison, vegetable, chicken, mince and potato (hamburger), steak. We quartered them and everyone shared. They were really good. Many, many stores sell them. Sorry, no photos. Too hungry, I guess.
We then returned to Mossburn to our little shack out back for the night. None of us survived until midnight.
