Two Days Two Sounds

Milford Sound

On our second full day we drove the five hours past some amazing scenery to Milford Sound. According to Wikipedia Rudyard Kipling named the Sound (although it is actually  Fjord and not a Sound) the 8th wonder of the world and it is easy to see why. The Maori used to visit the area for fishing in the cold winter months, and European settlers have always been attracted to the area. However it wasn't until the 40's that an easy route to the Sound could be built.

This is because Milford sound is pretty darn remote. Over two hours drive from the nearest petrol station, you have to be careful what to take (snow chain and fuel being essential). The drive takes you over some mountainous terrain and over a pass culminating in  a long tunnel that delves beneath the mountains. I spent some time reading about the construction of the road which was in itself no small feat and took many men, many years.

The beauty of our trip was that because it was midwinter (and around 0 degrees), there were barely any other tourists (as with the Routeburn track) as they were all up at the ski fields in Queenstown. But the scenery is perfect in any weather (provided you have the right clothes), in fact changes in weather made the scenery even more amazing and the trip even more exciting!

Here is a photo of a rainy clearing in the forest on one of our short walks (there will be more up on Flickr when I can get them to upload):

And the Sound itself when the clouds finally cleared:

Lucy chilling out:

But alas, we were unable to go on a boat trip out to the sound, just after taking this last photo, we were informed by the tourist office that the snows were closing in and the road would close at 5pm (40 minutes time) with the potential for being closed for s few days. We had to high tail it out of there.

Lake Manapouri and Doubtful Sound

We were so taken with the sound that we decided to drive as quickly as we could to Lake Manapouri (the gateway to Doubtful Sound) that afternoon. Lake Manapouri is in itself serene and beautiful. I took a nice shot in the morning:

To get to Doubtful Sound from here we had to take a 1 hour boat trip across the lake to the beginning of the Wilmot Pass (a very high pass created during the construction of the nearby Hydro Power station and not connected to any other roads!). And it snowed. And it snowed some more. And we were in a coach (albeit fitted with snow chains). And the road had some of the steepest roads in New Zealand:

From the other side of the pass, we caught another boat for a 3 hour trip around the Sound. We did see some seals, but couldn't see a lot due to the severity of the snowstorm. the captain said that he had never seen snow so far down in the Sound.

But it was beautiful to see and we were visiting the Sound as it is usually seen (it rains 2 out of 3 days there). I took this one of an extremely blue looking little boat against an extremely white background: