Tag 32 - Queenstown - Milford Sound (Fjorde)

Friday's credo was: get up early at 5:20 a.m. (if you don't work 😁)! There was a full day bus tour to the fjords of New Zealand. We were really excited and excited. I particularly like tours like this.

Brian was our guide and a great guy. He is an absolute cheerful person, funny, accommodating, very nice and loves his fjord landscapes. The bus is pretty well equipped. It has a glass roof and the seats are relatively comfortable and aligned at an acute angle to the windows - for a better view! The truth is: we booked exactly that 😁. You never know what you're really going to get. But that was fine. We were a bit worried at first about the temperatures on the bus. At the beginning the air conditioning was turned on. But Brian soon switched it off and switched to “Warm!” instead. Let's go! 🚌 🥾🌳🏔️⛴️ 🌊

During the trip, Brian always gave us interesting facts about the areas. Some things were even understood 😁. Our first stop after almost 2 hours was KiwiCountry in Te Anau. We made breakfast. To get us back to the right bus, he said: “The bus with the angry birds on it.” We thought it wouldn't be that difficult since it was the only bus at the moment. About 45 minutes later we came out of the cafe and were standing in front of 4 or 5 buses. There were the same angry birds everywhere 😅! But we found the bus, “confronted” our guide with it and laughed heartily afterwards. That was very amusing.

The closer we got to the fjords, the worse the weather became. That's probably normal and there are only about 20 days a year there without rain 😅. These are not the beautiful photo motifs for the wall at home. You simply have to see this part of New Zealand, experience it and take the images and impressions with you in your head. That's just nature.

Of course, we made numerous stops along the way to capture beautiful moments and preserve them with pictures - as is possible. Once we even saw keas (local birds that look like parrots). In my opinion, it really got spectacular when we went through the Homer Tunnel and came out. Brian said that we should all close our eyes. We hoped he wouldn't do that too😅. Then the command came to open our eyes and we looked into the valley (as far as we could see due to the clouds). We are surrounded by large mountains at close proximity and high altitude. The road zigzags downwards accordingly. That was pretty impressive - as were the achievements of the road builders and engineers. The roads/tunnels/bridges are all in very good condition, although some of them are exposed to extreme conditions. We can learn a lesson from this.

We reached the pier around 12:30 p.m. We continued with the “Milford Sovereign” at around 1:15 p.m. A boat tour followed. The journey was characterized by storm and rain 😅. This is just the southwest of New Zealand. It went along the fjords to the mouth of the ocean and then back again. On the way back you could see numerous waterfalls that spontaneously formed due to the rain. It was nice to see and experience this different face of New Zealand. But we were also happy to finally be able to walk to the bus again. When we got to the bus stop, we saw a lot of buses again and some of them had angry birds on them. It took a while until we recognized our guide. Again I noticed that there were just too many angry birds and everyone laughed. We were the last ones 😅🙈.

On the way back to Queenstown the sun came out more and gave us unique views over Lake Wakatipu and the landscape around it. Directly in front of us we could see the smaller, green hills with sheep on them, behind them were the larger, brown mountains and finally on the horizon we saw the large mountains with snow. There was also the blue sky and the turquoise lake. That was something profound for the soul and hopefully we will never forget it. 🤗

Good night 😴.