Hey guys!
This article will be a little bit longer than usual, because we just got to Milford Sound, probably the most beautiful part of New Zealand. If you type New Zealand into Google images, there will be many photos right from here, it’s kind of a symbol of Zealand. Unfortunately a lot of people knows this, so it’s a bit touristy, but that’s probably the only disadvantage of this place.
Milford Sound is located in Fiordlands National Park and apart from fiords, there are dozens of waterfalls, lakes and mountain peaks. Here you can also find most of the Great Walks here, which are the most beautiful multi-day tracks from 30 to 70 km long. They include Kepler Track, Heaphy Track, Roteburn Track and of course the famous Milford Track. When we were buying the plane tickets in November, we thought we would do this track as well, until we found out, that the huts are fully booked until August 2017, so unfortunately we had to skip that and choose just some one-day tracks. Well even those 20 km in one day were pretty tough!
We spent 3 days on Milford Sound, however you wouldn’t find any accommodation right on Milford, so we had to drive more than 80 km every day from Te Anau Downs.
The first day we took a three-hour cruise around the whole fiord. That’s definitely a must-do here, because this is the only way to see the whole fiord, many waterfalls and even a few seals along the coast! The second choice is to go on a guided kayak tour, but since the weather wasn’t really nice, we chose the comfy boat trip. Generally it rains almost all the time on Milford, so the cloudy sky and strong wind was still quite a win. It all reminded me of Norway a lot, when we took a ferry at the Geirangerfjord last summer.
The second day we went to see Mirror lakes, where the water reflects the mountains. It’s necessary to get up early too see the perfect reflection because the water is still and clear only early in the morning. We hiked a part of Kepler Track in the afternoon all the way to Brod Bay’s beach and back.
The next day we were still not happy with the pictures of Milford Sound we had, so hoping in better weather, we got on the road again. The sun came up for just a few seconds, so we just took some new, better, pictures and headed back. We wanted to do two more tracks here. The first one went in Gertrude Valley and the other one all the way up to the beautiful Marian Lake. Almost every peak around Milford is between 2000 and 3000 meters high, so both the valley and the mountain track were absolutely gorgeous!
In the afternoon we had to drive more that 6 hours to our next destination, which is Lake Tekapo, but more about it next time!
Love,
E.
