Milford Sound is one of the wettest places in the world, with 6,813 mm (22.4 ft) and 182 days of rain per year. It’s a deep, fjord surrounded by steep mountainous bluffs and it’s famous for an abundance of beautiful waterfalls.
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This was our tour boat, the Milford Adventurer, and we were away on schedule at 2:45 PM. The first thing we were to learn was that this was the fifth consecutive day of bright sunny weather, and the waterfalls “might not” have their regular flows.
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We quickly arrived at Angel Falls. The Captain told us that it had this name because the water falling towards you broke into large droplets that appeared to have angel wings. She was hopeful that we would see this, but the small amount of water coming over the falls broke into a fine mist long before it got close to the boat.
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We headed off into a sunny day and held onto our hats in the wind.
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Some of the waterfalls had flow, and the general beauty of the place made the day very worthwhile.
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We cruised down the sound to the open ocean and were very impressed with the beautiful fjord and the massive mountains.
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These bare rock faces are a result of a local phenomenon known as a tree fall. Apparently when there is a landslide here, there is so little soil that everything falls into the sea, leaving bare rock faces.
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To give some context to the size of the bluffs in the sound, the cruise ship in this photo has seventeen decks.
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And finally, some good waterfall activity!
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And here we are, fully sun-protected. It was a beautiful day and a great excursion.
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Once we were in our campground, we made a new friend. This little guy is a Weka, a flightless bird that is quite happy picking up your crumbs. He jumped up on the step and looked around before deciding not to go in. He then came over to me and gave me the once-over before deciding to head for greener pastures.
We enjoyed fine dining at the Milford Sound Lodge where we were camping and got ready for a nice drive out to Queenstown tomorrow.
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The route to Queenstown was retracing our steps of the previous two days. We had heard that there was an early rush to exit Milford Sound around 8 each morning, so we settled on a relaxed start at 9 o’clock.
About an hour out of Milford Sound we were back into arid grasslands, this time in the Eglinton River valley a half hour north of the lovely lakeside village of Te Anau.
We had a quick picnic lunch at a beautiful lakeside park in Te Anau and carried on to Queenstown.
Photography while driving the narrow winding highway exiting Milford Sound was very difficult. This segment includes the 1.2 km Homer Tunnel about 14 km from Milford Sound Lodge that takes you through a high mountain ridge to the interior side of the coastal mountains. I found a video on YouTube that shows drive from the Hundred Falls area on the Milford side, through Homer Tunnel to the Gertrude Valley Lookout on the interior side. The abundance of waterfalls in the early part of that film is why this area is called Hundred Falls. In our drive through this area on the sixth consecutive day without rain, we saw hardly a trickle.
This video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcCTmlXFHCg
Watch this in its entirety to get a sense of what driving these highways is like, and keep in mind we were driving a camperized Toyota minivan not a responsive sports car like in the video. Please do come back to grampafacts.ca after watching the video.