We stayed in Te Anau for one night. Te Anau is a base for doing lots of treks and fiordland viewing activities like scenic flights and cruises. We were going to do a 4-day trek but we didn't really have time in our schedule to spend 4 days hiking. And we'd grown attached to our campervan and we didn't really want to part with it for that long. Anyway, we'd found something really cool to do instead: the Milford road.

The Milford road is the road that runs north from Te Anau to Milford and it must be one of the most impressive roads in the world. It's definitely the most scenic drive I've ever been on. It takes 2 hours if you do it non stop but there are loads of viewing areas and short walks to stop at every 10kms or so and it ended up taking us a whole day. You can see from the photos the incredible scenery. You know those car adverts where the sports car is driving fast through windy mountain roads and forests with incredible scenery? It was exactly like that and even though I was actually driving a big black van, I'm sure I looked just as cool.

The weather was blue skies and sunshine again and camped beside Lake Gunn about 3/4 of the way towards Milford with an impressive backdrop of snowcapped mountains in the distance. I thought it would be a shame to camp by such a lovely lake and not go swimming in it so I got my trunks on and went for a little dip. It was absolutely freezing, I lost my flip flops and had to swim around underwater to find them, and when I got out I got attacked by all the sand flies. But it was worth it because photos look cool.

In the morning when we woke up we no longer had a view. The clouds had descended to sea level and it was very wet and cold. We spent all day hiking in the rain to see views of lakes and mountains that were all blocked out by low clouds.

The next day we drove the rest of the way to Milford. The rain was torrential at this point although Milford Sound is apparently the second wettest place in the world.

We got up especially early to make our way from our campsite to Milford Sound to go on a cruise. When we got out of bed it was the coldest yet. Our campsite was surrounded by mountains and it looked like the snowline had dropped significantly overnight and was now only about 200 metres above us. We drove the final 32km of the Milford road and it was the most spectacular scenery yet. Even though most of it was obscured by low cloud. All the way to Milford Sound it was torrential rain, but luckily once we got on our cruise ship the rain stopped and the cloud lifted!

The views on the cruise were incredible, unfortunately it was difficult to capture these views on the camera because it was so windy on the top deck. It seemed even windier than when we were caught up in Australia's biggest cyclone for 70 years. But these were cold cold winds. After the 90 minute cruise we drove to Queenstown.

Aidan.