Jean and I were up early catching the bus to Milford Sound at 7:00am. The trip took 4.5 hours each way along with a 2.25 hour boat trip on Milford Sound. The first 2 hours were interesting looking at the Southland landscape. The NZ government is promoting recovering the bush land to productive farmland for dairy farms. Right in the middle of it all is a reserve to protect that very bush land. The reason for the reserve was because they had discovered a bird (the Takahe) that they thought was extinct due to the stoats and ferrets which supposedly ate them all. So they have large areas of fenced reserve to prevent the animals from getting to the birds. There are apparently 250 of these birds alive today thanks to their breeding programs. When we started going through the pass to get to Milford Sound, the rain began in earnest. As they say, the hills were alive with....waterfalls!! Extremely steep mountain walls with narrow winding roads leading to Homer tunnel which is 1270 metres long through the mountain. They have full time monitors both at the top of the cliffs and the road level to look for potential falling rock at both ends of the tunnel. It was pretty nerve wracking going through there! The rain was bucketing down in Milford Sound which has the highest annual rainfall of any place in NZ. There is a waterfall next to the boat dock that had so much water flowing over it that it was leaping about 20 feet past the lip of the falls. Unfortunately, the clouds were so low that it was not possible to get a good pic of Mitre Peak but I did get lots of pics of waterfalls! Jean was quite happy because she finally saw penguins - Fiordland Crested penguins. On our way out, she saw Keas - the green southland parrot that lives on the south end of the island. It was late when we got back to the camper park but it was a good trip made even better by our bus driver who gave a running commentary about Maoris, his life story, and the history and geography of the Southland. He told us he was 65 years old and had been driving buses and captaining boats since 1970. He was most entertaining. One interesting thing we noticed- all the bus drivers and boat captains we have had were either named Paul or Mark! Not sure if those names are a prerequisite for doing those jobs! Tomorrow we will go to Glenorchy where Jane Campion filmed her tv series "Top of the Lake" and then we will probably head south to Invercargill. One interesting statistic- we were on the 45th latitude today which put us halfway between the equator and the Antarctic pole.