After the Catlins we made our way up the West Coast towards Milford Sound. It was a bit of a drive and we stopped briefly at Te Anau where there was a gorgous lake, we decided to stay in a free camp on the road to Milford. We chose a pretty little spot and started to relax...then we met the infamous sandflies. Sandflies are we think the most evil little critters we have ever met, swarms of them attacked us, we shut ourselves away in Rodney but loads of them were in there aswell, my lonely haviania came in really handy to splat them all! That night it rained really heavily, we had been told that the West coast is prone to heavy downpours so we were sort of expecting it. When we woke up the next day we decided to head down to Milford anyway and hope the weather would cheer up. The roads were quite scary on the way, extremely windy and beacause it was so wet and grey we couldnt figure out what we were looking at! We drove through a really eery tunnel that was dripping and finally we got down to Milford, we could see a break in the clouds and within no time the sun was out and there was blue skies! So we went and booked ourselves onto a 2 hour cruise, there were only about 8 people on the boat so we had loads of space! Milford Sound was simply stunning, because of the heavy rainfall earlier there were thundering waterfalls tumbling off the mountains and into the sea. We were in awe of the beauty surrounding us! The boat went all the way out to sea where it was really choppy and on the way back we went pass some seals laying on the rocks! We saw Mitre Peak which looked magnificent and then we saw a few dolphins jumping out the water!! To finish it off, when we got off the boat there was a really funny penguin standing by the boats, he just looked like he was waiting in a line and he kept wiggling his tail, then he would go under water. We watched him for ages....very cute indeed!!! We went back and spent the night at the free camp again and had fun with a million sandflies again!! We would have loved to have gone to Doubtful sound aswell but time and money prevented us!!

Next stop Queenstown!