January 21 - January 23
Saturday, January 21
We're leaving Queenstown today to head to Te Anau but decide to do a bit more luging since we have a relatively short 2 hour drive. We take the Skyline Gondola up the mountain overlooking Queenstown and end up taking a bunch of pictures. Queenstown sits at the bottom of a number of different mountains and the views from the top is fantastic. The luging is pretty fun too. They have an incredible advanced track that has huge hills in it.
Te Anau is our stop off point for our visit to Milford sound as it's about halfway between Queensland and the Sound. It's an easy drive and on the way we start passing lots and lots of antique cars heading towards Queenstown. There's a vintage car rally happening in the South Island. We've been seeing them all along our trip. After a while, Travis decides to try capturing more car pictures, but as it turns out, this isn't at all easy when the photographer is in a speeding car going the opposite direction of the speeding antique car. He takes about 250 pictures but only manages to capture parts of cars in about 20 of them. He vows never to take another car picture while in a moving car!
We get checked into our cottage and since we have time, decide to book a cruise to the Te Anau Glow Worm cave (remember the Glow Worms back at the Waitomo Caves in Leg 2?). The cruise leaves town at 8:15 PM and returns about 11:00 PM. We end up really enjoying the caves as they have lots and lots of water running through them over the various levels. The trip involves two different boats inside the cave alone. It's a good evening.
Sunday, January 22
Today is our trip to Milford Sound. We've got about a two hour drive to get there but our boat cruise isn't until 2:45 so we've got a pretty leisurely morning on the way there. As we get closer to the sound, it becomes clear that it's going to be raining and pretty misty. As it turns out, this means there will be hundreds of waterfalls.
Milford Sound is basically a large bay along the west coast that has a bunch of mountains springing up right out of the bay (the largest being Mitre Peak at 5520 feet). While it's called Milford Sound, it's actually a Fjord as it was carved out by a number of different glaciers during various ice ages (a Sound is technically carved out by a river). Milford Sound is over 1150 feet deep but is only 100 feet deep at the entrance to the Tasman sea.
Milford Sound is also one of the wettest places on earth. It gets between 20-30 feet of rain every year (twice as much as the Amazon Rainforest). Because the mountains lining the sound are all rock, the water basically just pours down the mountain faces as waterfalls. The freshwater picks up tannins (dyes) from the plants on the rock walls and since the fresh water doesn't mix with the salt water, it creates a dark layer of fresh water on the surface that can be as much as 16 feet thick. This means that creatures and coral that normally would grow at 500 feet depth can survive at less than 100 feet in Milford Sound. As a result, there is the Milford Deep Observatory which has a chamber 30 feet deep which allows you to view the "deepwater" creatures without doing any deepwater diving.
Another interesting feature of Milford Sound is that the mountains are covered in trees and plants despite having almost no ground soil. The trees lock roots together to hold each other on the mountains. Every once in a while, trees up high will get too large and create tree avalanches!
On the cruise, we must have seen hundreds and hundreds of waterfalls but apparently only a handful of them are permanent (there when it's not raining). The boat takes you directly under many of these falls (hence the bright blue ponchos that Doug fought with).
Tomorrow we head back to Queenstown to catch a flight to Auckland (our final leg). We've got a race booked on Tuesday on one of the America's cup yachts which should be exciting.
Catch you in a couple of days for our last update. We hope you've enjoyed this. Our trip is almost over and neither of us are excited about having to return back to work.
Cheers!
Logistics
Te Anau is slightly off the beaten track, but we have to go to this area to see Milford Sound and the Milford Deep Underwater Observatory. The viewing chamber is 34 feet (10.4 meters for our metric friends) underwater! How cool is that?
We have a cottage rented for 2 nights.
When we finish up our adventure here, we'll be making a mad dash back to Queenstown to catch a flight to Auckland.
Before we left Queenstown, we decide to do some more luging (like in Rotorua). Since we already have luge pics and video, we just take a panoramic of Queenstown.
We head to Milford Sound and stop by Mirror Lakes on the way. See the sign reflection just to the right of Doug?
We took a boat cruise tour of Milford Sound.
Travis in front of one of the many waterfalls.
Lady Bowen Waterfall. It's taller than Niagra Falls (525 feet).
Travis on the Milford Sound boat.
We see some lazy sea lions during the tour too.
It's a rainy day on the boat and Doug has to put on a rain poncho.
Another really tall waterfall (Stirling Falls).
The boat takes us very close to the waterfalls.
Some of the colorful underwater life at the Milford Deep Underwater Observatory.