Milford Sound, or “It must look lovely when the sun shines!”

Please note that these various blogs are not in chronological order but are in the order that one of us has got round to writing it or to sorting out our photos! We went to Milford Sound on Monday 18th February – after Te Anau and a few days before Queenstown.

Up bright and early in the sunshine for our day trip to Milford Sound. The drizzle started as we left our room (Explorer Motel). Some of the mountains we had seen the previous evening were barely visible. We took the coach to Milford Sound so we could both see the scenery. David slept. As we left, there was a rainbow, but then the many-layered cloud cover prevented any sunshine.

We were driven along Milford Highway, through the Fjordland National Park of beech forest. The trees grow on the rock (there’s no soil), as their horizontal roots spread out and link up. Counterintuitively, the mountain beech grows only low down, while the red beech and silver beech grow on the mountains. The coach driver kept telling us how much more amazing the views are in the rain because most of the waterfalls occur only when it rains…. This is lucky, as it rains 200d per year, with an annual rainfall of 7m to 8m.

We stopped to see the Mirror Lakes, where the scenery is mirrored perfectly in good weather. The photos look better than it did at the time, bizarrely.

There were very few birds around, apart from some gulls, but quite a few seals.

The more spectacular waterfalls are there every day but the hundreds of smaller waterfalls we saw were less usual, being temporary starting and stopping within minutes or a couple of hours of it raining.

Judi, thanks for the advice to bring layers. We wore almost all of them! We cruised almost to the Tasman Sea, then returned.

On the return voyage, we saw some sealions and the major waterfall en route to Milford Haven, then had the return coach trip back to Te Anau.

Before getting dressed, we had sprayed ourselves all over with the DEET that Judi and Ivor had brought back for us. One benefit of the almost incessant rain was that the notorious sandflies dislike getting wet more than we do!