My first morning in Queenstown I woke up early to catch a 7:30 bus to Milford Sound which is situated deep within Fiordland National Park. It was a coach-cruise-coach deal where your roundtrip transportation (8 hours on a bus in total!) is included with the price of your boat ride up and down the sound. I had checked the weather the evening before while near Lake Tekapo and could see that full sunshine was in store for the next day so I quickly made a reservation. I had read that Milford Sound/Fiordland National Park gets 330 days of clouds and rain a year (35 feet of annual rainfall!!) so I was blessed with a unique day of sunshine! (it can even rain 20 inches in one day!)
You need to see a map of this area of South Island because via a straight line Milford Sound and Queenstown should only be an hour apart from each other at the most. However, due to the gigantic mountain ranges the only road (and I do mean ONLY road) into Milford Sound comes from the south and Queenstown is northeast of the sound. So our bus first went to Te Ano (home of the second largest lake in New Zealand - creatively named Lake Te Ano) and we had a small rest stop there before heading back northwest towards the coast.
Our tour bus driver was a wealth of information about the area teaching us about the honey production, deer farms, growth in dairy farming, etc. My family will be interested to know that apparently a number of the Hobbit scenes from LOTR were filmed in Fiordland National Park and Sir Peter Jackson was back on set there just 3-4 months prior filming more scenes for another hobbit movie of which I was not aware.
I learned how common tree avalanches are in the park. The towering beech trees have very shallow roots and are susceptible to strong winds. We saw many places where the mountain sides had been pretty near wiped clean of vegetation due to falling trees and their domino effect. Imagine watching one! I think it would be cooler (and scarier?) to see than a snow avalanche!
To get to the sound we also had to go through a tunnel carved right into a mountain. It isn't reinforced at all - it's just the rock of the mountain and apparently solid enough as is. It took 30 years to build due to (snow) avalanche disruptions!! It is one lane and flow of traffic is assisted ith a traffic light in the summer, but in the winter, you enter at your own risk like we did!
Milford Sound and its "sister" Doubtful Sound are actually inaccurately named (which I suspected!) because they are really fjords. Fjords are formed by glacier or ice movement whereas a sound is formed by river/water erosion. So I can check "seeing a fjord" off my bucket list (but I will still make it to the Norwegian ones one day!) This part of New Zealand is considered the most beautiful setting in the country so I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking!
Lastly, to help make this boat trip as enjoyable as possible I used a tip from my RJ boating co-workers and wore one of the Transderm patches behind my ear to help with sea sickness. I think it made me a bit drowsy (or else that could have been the only 5 hours of sleep the night before), but it otherwise worked! No sea sickness at all!
I bet I can name the LOTR movie scene that Milford Sound was used in. Toward the end of the Fellowship of the Ring, the fellowship is spread out in two long canoes, paddling down a long wide river and they paddle pass two mammoth statues of elves guarding the two sides of the river. your second and fourth pictures from the bottom of the page look just like the fjord in the movie. -Rachel
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