Milford Sound

Over the next couple of days, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced that returning residents and visitors arriving in New Zealand must quarantine for 14 days. Technically this had no effect on us because we had already been in the country a week, but it did make us wonder what would happen next.

Our daughter Jeanette who lives in San Francisco texted that the mayor had announced that everyone in the city should shelter in place. Restaurants, bars, and stores were closing. Events involving over 100 people were being cancelled. We searched desperately for news programs on the television but found only British Bake-Off shows and competitions between restaurants in Australia and New Zealand.

A sense of uneasiness was growing among the locals we encountered who worked in the tourist industry. They were concerned for their own health, but it seemed that mainly they were wondering what they would do if there were no tourists. Overall, though, daily life in In Te Anau was still proceeding much as you would expect it to proceed in a popular tourist destination. The tours we had booked to Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound were meant to be the highlights of our trip so we decided to keep going and continue as planned.

We spent a day doing laundry, searching for news and enjoying our lake view. We also worked in a visit to the tiny, but interesting, Te Anau Bird Sanctuary just across the road. The sanctuary is home to a small collection of native birds that have been injured or cannot survive in the wild for various reasons. The birds pictured below are the takahē - a flightless bird that was once thought to be extinct - and the kākā - a type of parrot.

The next day found us once again waiting in front of the motel in the pre-dawn chill for the bus that would take us to New Zealand's most popular tourist attraction.

Milford Sound is more accessible than Doubtful Sound, but it's still a very remote location. Most tourists visiting for the day get there by bus which they book along with their boat tour. It's a 2 hour drive to the sound from Te Anau, and traveling from Queenstown adds an additional 2 hours to the trip because you have to drive to Te Anau first to pick up Highway 94 - the only road that goes to Milford Sound. There are no towns and very few services on the Highway, and the road is prone to flooding.

Our first stop was a chilly marsh where we were stunned by the beauty of the mountains emerging from the fog and darkness.

When we were on the bus, we learned that Highway 94 had been heavily damaged by flooding during storms several months before. Buses and other vehicles wishing to travel through the construction zone had to line up on the highway at certain times during the day and travel together as a convoy through the area.

This was quite a surprise since we had heard nothing about this, and the New Zealand website I relied on so heavily had suggested that driving to Milford Sound was a worthwhile adventure. We had briefly considered it, but thankfully we had decided on taking the bus.

The bus stopped at a couple of other scenic spots before we finally arrived at the tiny town of Milford Sound.

You would expect that a town in such an incredible location would be bursting with hotels and restaurants and gift shops, but there's none of that here. Tourists generally travel hours, take a boat tour, and go back to Te Anau or Queenstown afterwards. There's a campground, but the internet tells me that only about 120 people actually live in the town full time. There is also a small airport for people who prefer to fly in tiny planes from Queenstown.

Our tour boat was a bit larger and much more crowded than the one on Doubtful Sound. We boarded and ended up sharing a table with a couple of German men who mostly ignored us, but after the boat got underway, we spent most of our time outside enjoying the incredible scenery. Inexplicably, one of the men spent most of the time on the boat looking at brochures that advertised other tourist activities.

The day was glorious!

I believe that the pinnacle in the center of the picture is one of the iconic sights in the fiord - Mitre Peak.

Unlike Doubtful Sound where we seemed to have the entire fiord to ourselves, there were always several other boats in sight on Milford Sound. Because of the logistics of getting to the area, almost all the cruises are offered around midday.

Instead of being told that we were incredibly lucky to be visiting on such a beautiful day, we heard multiple times that it's a shame it wasn't raining because Milford Sound is best experienced in the rain. There was no shortage of waterfalls, but, of course, there would be even more in the rain.

Once again we headed out to experience the Tasman Sea and paused by a rock being enjoyed by sunning seals.

Part of the Milford Sound experience is to bring the boat right up to a cliff so that a waterfall comes cascading onto the deck. When it was time for our boat to do so, we sought cover because of our cameras.

All too soon it was time to head back to the dock. Taking the two boat trips had been expensive, but they were definitely worth the expense.

We made a couple of stops to admire scenic views on the way back. In the pictue below you can see the buses lined up waiting for the construction to pause so we can travel through the work area. When I asked the young woman driving the bus if it was difficult to maneuver such a large vehicle down such narrow twisty roads and through the construction zones, she told me that it was actually easier now because there were fewer camper vans on the road so she didn't have to worry so much about coming around a sharp curve to the sight of one taking up more than its fair share of the highway.

The picture on the right shows some rocks with some interesting red stuff growing on them.

It was sad to leave our lovely lakefront view, but it was time for us to begin to make our way slowly back to Christchurch. Our next destination was Queenstown.