After been on the road for a while we realised we had been closer than we thought to where we were headed, which was called Milford Sound. Otherwise known as Fiordland, which is on the south west coast in the middle of nowhere. The road only leads to this place and you need plenty of fuel to get there and back, as there is no petrol station once you arrive. The route was through mountains and winding roads, one of which had a tunnel cut directly through a mountain as it was too big to go around or over it. The down side to this is you have around a fifteen minute wait at the lights either end, as the tunnel only had one lane.

Once at Milford Sound the road ended at the sea where there was a port and a visitors centre, which was also the ticketing office for the only thing to do in Milford which was go on a boat cruise. The boat cruises were all pretty similar with the only difference been wether you had a nature specialist aboard or not, which we decided we didn’t need. This decided, we booked a 2 hour cruise for the afternoon which left us time for dinner and the chance to double check that we were not mistaken in thinking that there was nothing else to see in Milford.

We boarded our boat around 3pm with the added greeting of free tea and coffee throughout the trip, which we made the most of as you do. The captain was a font of all local knowledge so much so we wondered why you would ever need a nature guide with a local captain this knowledgeable. The route we sailed was a pathway between the mountains heading out to the sea, which displayed waterfalls from all sides which in 48 hours without rain would be gone. Most of the waterfalls are non existent unless it rains, then as above they dry up in 48 hours. The reason they dry up so quickly is because the rain forest that has some how grown on the mountain side soaks up he remainder of the water. The reason we say ’somehow’ is because the forest has grown directly from the rocks, this is odd as the rock surface doesn’t have any top soil for the trees to grow from. All this said there is one waterfall that Is pretty big and is directly from a natural spring, it also provides the entire water source for the Milford sound and boats as there is no way they could pump water that far due to the remoteness of the village. To give you an idea of its size the village gets up to a maximum of 300 people living there, which is high for them and that is only in the summer months as people go to work on the boats. So as you can tell its pretty small.

We also saw some NZ fur seals lazing around on a rock, which seemed way to high for them to have climbed up to, so maybe they got there at high tide and were chilling until they could get back off! The captain took the boat close enough to the water fall that the top deck got soaked, followed by a viewing of another spring coming directly from the middle of the mountain side. Which no one had been able to trace its source for some hundreds of years, which was largely due to its positioning in the mountain side. The remainder of our trip was full of other local knowledge from the captain and a calm journey back to shore. Once back on dry land we wasted no time setting off back to find our previous nights stop spot, but on the way we encountered a mall place called ’mirror lakes’. Unlike the last place that claimed have mirror lakes this actually did, and with a mountain backdrop as you can see on the pics it was pretty impressive. Shortly after we arrived back at our stop spot and that was that for another day, we had tea and watched the daylight dim over the lake before calling it a night.