From Te Anau to Milford Sound

Heading to the next, if not the biggest highlight of New Zealand: Milford Sound, probably the best-developed fjord in the southwestern Fiordland of New Zealand. Although 'well-developed' is relative. You drive around the mountain range from Queenstown to Te Anau on the road, where we set up our tent as a starting point. If you're in a hurry, you can also fly over the mountain from Queenstown, but then you'll miss the truly amazing route from Te Anau to Milford. The town of Te Anau itself is also quite nice and is located on the beautiful Lake of the same name, where you can take a nice walk to the bird sanctuary, which is home to the rare Takahe. But from here you can also go on a real hiking adventure, for example, the Kepler Track starts here or the Routeburn Track from Glenorchy ends a few miles towards Milford Sound.

We stayed in Te Anau for 4 days because the weather forecast finally predicted good weather for Milford Sound, and only for one day. After all, we want to see something, but on many days it pours here like buckets and it's often foggy. We were told that Milford Sound receives an average of 6000 mm of rainfall per year, in 2016 it was even 9 meters! So most tourists with a tight vacation schedule have rain here, while we could afford the luxury of waiting for good weather.

Although Te Anau is the last place before Milford Sound, there are still 120 km to the village of Milford Sound via a country road with a pass and a one-way tunnel controlled by traffic lights. We started early at 7 am when not all the tour buses are on the road yet and there is still not much traffic. And what a pleasure it was: bright blue sky, little traffic, great country road, the tour in the morning sun was already fantastic. And there are also some interesting stopping points along the way, such as lookouts to the spectacular mountain landscape or the Mirror Lakes. In the afternoon on the way back, we saw the chaos at these spots and were glad to have seen them in the morning.

Arriving in Milford Sound, we went straight to the ticket counter to pick up our reserved tickets. Unbelievable what kind of terminal building is there, it looked like a train station of a medium-sized German city! And outside there was a considerable number of excursion boats. We chose a smaller company that took a slightly longer route because they also made a detour over the open sea at the end of the fjord.

The boat tour was spectacular. It's incredible how high the mountains rise almost vertically several hundred meters out of the water here, and there are waterfalls everywhere. Our ship also went very close to rocks with seals and often approached the waterfalls so closely that the passengers on the open deck got completely soaked. In addition, the ride was quite bumpy, and the noise of the water was deafening. We saw a large ship passing by quickly, the passengers there were denied this fun. We did it right, thanks to the travel guide.

On the way back, we also visited the Milford Discovery Centre & Underwater Observatory to get an insight into the underwater world. It is a platform with a kind of underwater stairwell, where you can look about 10 meters deep into the underwater world through windows in a capsule. For real divers, certainly child's play, but worth seeing for us as non-divers. We saw a lot of fish, and the special highlight were the Black Corals, which are ironically white. The interesting thing here is that you could see a plant and animal world that is actually only visible at great depths because it is already very dark in shallow depths in Milford Sound due to a thick brown layer of freshwater and the steep slopes around it. And since the weather was so beautiful, we lingered a bit on the platform and enjoyed the mountain panorama in the sun. No question, despite the mass tourism here, it was one of the most beautiful days of our trip!