Milford Sound

We left Te Anau early this morning, to make it to Milford Sound (2 hours north) for our boat tour.

Pretty clouds hanging over Lake Te Anau this morning.

Mirror lakes. The reflection of the mountains was near perfect.

Homer Tunnel.  Before this was put in, the mail was delivered by climbing up and over the mountian on the "Homer Rope."  This tunnel goes down through the mountain on a steep slope, and the other side is a sheer rock face, twice as tall as the photo above.  I hope they paid that mailman well.

  

The sides of the tunnel are just rough mountain rock... no fancy concrete here.

Made it to Milford.  This mountain is Mitre Peak.

...which happens to be the name of the boat tour company we chose.  There were tonnes to choose from, but I think we picked the best one on this particular day.  You'll see why...

Nice views from the water.  We learned that Milford Sound is incorrectly named, since "sounds" are created by rivers, whereas these were created by glaciers making them fjords.

It rains a LOT here... up to 9 meters and 250 days out of the year on average.  I guess we were lucky to be there on a sunny day.  When it rains there are dozens of waterfalls everywhere, but this is one of two permanent waterfalls.

We were lucky to have some visitors!  This was the first dolphin sighting since June, and they took a liking to our boat.  (Yay, Mitre Peak!  The other boat tours just passed by watching enviously.)

They swam at the front of the boat for about ten minutes.  I'm not sure if the boat was propelling them along, or if they were really swimming that fast, but they were having a lot of fun!  (And so were we!)  They were jumping and playing, rolling over on their backs and scratching their bellies on the hull... we have some great videos!

This was our "dolphin high".

The boat took us right out into the Tasman, which was very rough!  Then we headed back into the fjord.

More pretty views.

This is the other permanent waterfall.

We saw some sleepy seals.  This one was flapping his flippers as though he was swimming in his dreams.

We stopped off at a floating underwater observatory.  The heavy rainfall creates a unique marine environment... it washes lots of soil from the hills, creating a layer of sediment-filled freshwater that sits in a layer above the salt water.  This makes the salt water very dark, so many of the species living here are normally only found 500 meters below.  (Kinda neat, but not worth the admission price.)

Back to Queenstown on the way home to Cromwell.  Chris loves these ski-resort type towns.

Chris giggled like a wee school girl.

I gotta stop buying souvenirs... Chris is finding is harder and harder to carry my bag.

We ate here, Pub of the Wharf.

Then we went here..."Minus 5" the ice bar.

I had a "jucy lucy" fruit mocktail, which turned to frozen sludge in my ice-glass.