Milford Sound

This morning I woke when it was still dark to get an early start up the Milford Sound road, to beat the droves of the cars and tour buses. The sky was clear and the air cold; I kept having to defrost my windshield so I could sort of make out the road in front of me with the rising sun in my eyes. I'd read about this road before (Lonely Planet reads, "it's the kind of scenery that makes cars swerve wildly off the road as their drivers reach for the camera") but no words properly prepare you for magnificence of this scale. When I reached the Eglinton River Valley, where the mountains first appear, I was awestruck.

I didn't know how to take it all in. I felt that I couldn't comprehend it appropriately in the way I was passing through it so quickly in my car. Strangely I was almost relieved when I drove on and the clouds began to obscure the view and take the pressure off my senses to make sense of it all.

At one point I stopped at an unmarked pullout alongside Monkey Creek, a known haunt of the Blue Duck, an endangered alpine species. It took me two minutes to find it. I got out of the car, looked down the creek one way, and then the other, and there it was, standing in the water some 30 meters away. "Get outta town," I said. "There you are." I walked down the creek towards it through the tall wet grass, and discovered it was one of a pair. Together they moved up the stream, ducking their heads in the water to grab edibles in suspension and along the creek bed. When they'd do so, you couldn't hardly tell the difference between their backs and the nearby rounded stones of the creek--they looked the same.

Carrying on I caught my first ever glimpses of the world's only alpine parrot, the Kea, at Homer Tunnel and again in the carpark for The Chasm.

After checking into the hostel in Milford, I booked a 2-hour cruise of the fiord for the afternoon. The trip started out quite windy and there were lots of clouds obscuring the furthermost peaks, but by the time the boat had returned from the Tasman Sea, the wind had died down and the weather was clear, the blue sky contrasting brilliantly against the massive cliffs, spires, and glaciated mountains rising out of the water. As we approached Stirling Falls, the sun struck the cascade, causing a luminous rainbow. It was beautiful to watch as we approached. The boat then rode right into the fall, so that you could look straight up and see the water tumbling over the cliff and dissipating in tumbling swirls directly overhead. I was just overcome by the beauty of it.