crazyscot | Day 19: Land, Sea and no Air

No-one's going to believe we were on holiday, they're going to think we've sat in a darkened room with Photoshop for three weeks!

Up at sparrowfart o'clock this morning for our day trip to Milford Sound. We had booked a package comprising a coach trip, cruise and relatively short (but immensely scenic) flight back over the Southern Alps, returning us to our digs at the relatively respectable 5pm or so to make up for the 0715 pick-up.

Our accommodation being just outside of Queenstown, we were the first pick-up and had to wait patiently as our driver wove his way around town to get everyone. Like the Cape Reinga trip, we had assorted commentary and stops en route, the first of which was an unremarkable tea stop in at Te Anau. After there, though, the terrain got progressively wilder and the morning fog lifted: we were already in mountain country, but they became even more jagged and generally covered in forest. The even more serious mountain country began when our driver pointed out the huts they use as a checkpoint in the winter (nobody gets past unless they are using snow chains and know how to drive on ice).

There were a few sightseeing stops as we made our way; Mirror Lakes stick in the mind as being almost like glass, as expected due to their lack of flow and slightly sheltered location. We passed some hotel-type accommodation as well, causing me to muse that that would really be getting away from it all in the middle of nowhere (not to mention being a fantastic base for wilderness walking, if you're into that).

Speaking of wilderness, I noticed that the bus had both iridium and satellite phones. Seeing as the last 120km of Highway 94 has only a couple of hundred residents to speak of, cell coverage peters out rather unsurprisingly in Te Anau. Our driver believed that their company was the only one that runs Milford tours using satphone-enabled buses.

Eventually, we reached the apex of the road: the southern portal to the Homer Tunnel. This is 1.2km long passing under Mounts Belle and Talbot; it has a 10% gradient throughout its length. It's only really one vehicle wide, with a couple of passing regions so that faster uphill traffic doesn't get caught forever behind a bus or truck. Because of this, entry is controlled by traffic lights on a 15 minute cycle... except when it isn't. The signals are turned off overnight, and all the time in the winter as the southern portal is in an avalanche risk zone so they don't want people stopping there. I found myself wondering how many times buses or trucks meet head-to-head; can't be that often, I supposed, as there will be fewer tourist runs in the winter, and it's common knowledge that northbound is the peak direction all morning and southbound all afternoon.

Emerging from the tunnel, the steep gradient continued amidst a whole stack of hairpins as the road did an infernal tango with the Cleddau River. It took my breath away (err, again) as it descended from about 3000' to sea level in the space of 18km - an average gradient of 5%, though the higher sections were hairier. We made another sightseeing stop at The Chasm,

a cascade/falls spot which has differentially eroded the rocks of different hardnesses leaving holes in the rock in strange alienesque shapes I'd never encountered before.

And so, finally, on to the cruise terminal. Our driver went to sort out the boarding passes for the group, and returned with the bad news that our flight wasn't able to operate because of the low cloud. Milford airport, he went on to explain, is also unusual in that it has an ordinary sort of runway close to sea level but operates "one-way" like a mountain strip: you always take off heading out to sea and land towards the land, as the mountains make it impractical to do anything else. (I wonder if there's a workable go-around strategy?) We were disappointed (and now lumbered with a long coach ride back), but there was nothing we could have done about it.

Slightly disappointedly, we boarded the cruise ship and waited for it to get underway. One of the local pods of dolphins was in the sound today and we went over to see them - then they swam alongside us (despite being utterly dwarfed by the ship) for a while which was magical. We saw several waterfalls at a distance and the skipper brought the ship's bow right under one of them - water crashing off overhanging rock several hundred feet up.

Our journey took us out of the sound and into the Tasman, and it was quite clear when we got there: being a fiord, Milford gets quite a lot of natural shelter, and no sooner had we rounded the lighthouse than we were buffeted around, waves crashing over the bow, some mad people standing in front of the wheelhouse getting wet! We didn't spend long out there, as the skipper explained there wasn't much else to see unless you had all day to go places.

On the way back we went close up to the rather impressive Stirling Falls - 900 metres or so of due up, which water just streams out of. The depth of the fiord there is a mind-boggling 300 metres, right up to the rock wall! As if that wasn't enough, opposite those falls lies the mighty Mitre Peak - 1683 metres high of almost sheer rock wall. (Our skipper added that Milford was beset by a drought - it hadn't rained for five whole days. Normally the Stirling Falls are more spectacular than what we saw, and we often can't get within 100 feet.)

All too soon we had returned to the cruise terminal, and it was time to get on the coach back to Queenstown. I sat and read in mostly stunned silence for most of the journey; the high country scenery was still fantastic, but had been comprehensively dwarfed by Fiordland, and I was having trouble processing it all.