Monday, February 21 - Onward to Milford Sound

Milford Sound. What can I say. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a fjord along the west coast of the South Island of NZ. Its world renowned in many ways, for its beauty, for the fact that the main mountain there, Mitre, is the tallest mountain along a coastline anywhere in the world, over 6000 ft straight up from the surface of the sound. Its also got a lot of wildlife and is very scenic. All you need is good weather or bad weather. If you have good weather, as we had, then you get stunning views, as you can see from the pictures below this entry. If you get bad weather (Milford gets about 20 FEET of rain per year, one of the highest totals anywhere in the world) then you can see many temporary waterfalls, and if its windy to boot, then some of these waterfalls seem to flow UPWARDS because of the force of the wind. So it’s a great place in most conditions. As it happens, we had a perfect sunny day, which happens only about 10% of the days during the summer, and we counted our blessings. Maybe next time we will be privileged to see bad weather, cause those waterfalls sound amazing…in any case, we also saw some fern crested penguins, which is quite rare in February since they are supposed to be out at sea until the winter, which starts in June here (remember, everything is opposite here in the southern hemisphere, also known as the antipodes – even the driving as we remarked on above!) I have a picture I enlarged of them – they were quite cute, but only about 8 to 12 inches in height (20 to 30 cm for those of you into metrics) – we got to see them for a few minutes, till they got scared and jumped across some rocks into the fjord. Its more of a hopping motion, that’s all I can say….

Also, that reminds me of the drive to Milford – its an very spectacular and winding drive through mountain gorges and a long tunnel. We saw some very nice waterfalls and streams along the way, which are also pictured above, and we had a sheep encounter. Whats that, you ask? Well, imagine its 8am after getting little sleep after the day from hell, and suddenly you have sheep streaming across the road – did I say streaming? I mean engulfing the road – we came across a farmer who was moving his thousands of sheep across the road – instead of fighting the flood, all the cars parked and watched the sheep calmly obey the traffic laws and stay on their side of the road, with only a few sheep dogs to keep them obedient. Quite a site, as you can see from the pictures…As I said, 70 million sheep, and they have to live somewhere…

We ended off the Milford cruise with a side trip to a unique underwater observatory. Since Milford Sound gets so much rain and is quite narrow with steep mountains on both sides, all the rain essentially blankets the ocean water, and provides a 3-5 ft fresh water layer of rain water on top of the sea water. What happens is that this layer filters out much of the light and some of the warmth from the sky and fools plants and animals into thinking they are much deeper, 100 to 300 ft deep instead of 10 ft deep. As such, the conditions are like on the ocean floor, and there are rare fish and coral in Milford that you can only view out at sea usually. I also have a few pictures of this below – the coral is especially beautiful – its black coral, which is white when alive, though most of us only ever see it when its dead and turns black…a great day, and our weather luck continues to hold…