Milford Sound

Feb. 23-24 Leaving early from our campground we gassed up in Queenstown and headed south and west to Te Anau, the jumping off point so to speak for Milford Sound.  We got to Te Anau in time for lunch and got great hamburgers at Bailez on the main street.  Te Anau seems pretty prosperous, numerous restaurants and shops and built on a curve in the lake.  After browsing a little and picking up breakfast provisions he headed northwest on the road to Milford Sound to our lodging about 30 km in, the Fiordland National Park Lodge.  It is not affiliated with the park, I think it just has that name because it borders the park.  It was an adequate lodge but we were glad we’d had a big lunch because it turned out the restaurant was not operating.  We made do with snacks from our supply.  I took a walk down to the lake and across the street around part of Mistletoe Lake.  It is a small lake surrounded by marshy areas and beech forest.  The beech forests here seemed fairly dry, not dripping with moss as on the wetter west coast.  But when you step off the compacted path the ground is very soft, like walking on thick sponges.

The next morning we set off under cloudy skies for Milford Sound at 7:45 am.  The drive is fairly easy following a pretty valley for the first 60 km or so and then narrows as it goes up and over the divide to Milford Sound.  An ambitious entrepreneur built a long tunnel through the last saddle blocking the way to the Sound.  It’s a one way tunnel and the center is very rough cut.  They do have traffic lights at either end.  All the way through the mountains the rain got heavier and waterfalls cascaded down the sides of cliffs. 

Milford Sound in the rain

Approaching a waterfall

There’s a big car park when you get to the sound and one large café.  From there you walk a few minutes to the boat terminal.  We were booked on the 9:45 am Southern Discoveries nature cruise.  The boat holds maybe a hundred people and they handed us a bunch of plastic cards for our various activities.  The boat has a covered outdoor area in back on 2 decks and you can go around to the bow as well.  The indoor areas have big windows and comfortable seats.  We sat next to an Australian couple from Adelaide and chatted about heat waves and droughts in between jumping up to go outside for the view through the rain.

The smaller specks are little fish and the blob at the front a bigger fish.  The ferny things are the corals.

The boat can go very close to the edges of the fiord and puts its bow under a couple waterfalls.  We saw fur seals and a few birds but no dolphins.  The boat turns around just a little way into the much choppier Tasman Sea and docks 20 minutes later at the Underwater Discovery Center.  This building floats and has a cylindrical room underneath 60 steps deep with very thick plexiglass windows.  Outside are floating gardens with mostly naturally colonized animals that have been developing over the last 30 years.  They did transplant some black coral (which look like white ferny corals while they are alive).  It was amazing the number of fish swimming around out there just under the surface.  From tiny wrasses to larger 12 – 18” fish.  We also saw big starfish with fat legs, tube worms, and anemones.

From here you have the option to go kayaking, but as the rain was pouring down we decided to take the next boat back to the terminal instead. 

The Chasm

On the way back to Te Anau we stopped at The Chasm, a very cool area where a stream has carved its way through granite and created lots of smooth edge holes in the rocks.  You walk through a very mossy beech forest on the way to the stream.

Jake helping himself to snacks in the Te Anau Lodge library

Back in Te Anau we checked into one of our nicer lodgings, the Te Anau Lodge a few km from downtown in sort of a suburban neighborhood.  The building was moved to the site from about 100 km away and had been a convent for the Sisters of Mercy.  It was originally built in 1937 and has a lot of beautiful woodwork.  The area around it is being developed as a nice garden.  We drove downtown for dinner and a lot of the better restaurants were completely booked.  We ended up eating at the Olive Tree Café, moving inside from the pleasant patio when it started to rain.  Jake had a very good smoked salmon dish.  My seafood salad was okay but not great.  The pinot gris we tried was oddly sweet although not bad with the seafood. The lodge serves breakfast in the former Rectory room.  A nice array of continental breakfast options and/or eggs and bacon.