Milford Sound

Yesterday was March 1st - the 1st day of fall! Of course, most of the beach forest on the South Island and all of the sub-tropical stuff is continuously shedding and budding leaves, but there are poplars and other deciduous trees down here that will actually do the whole turn gold and drop leaf thing.

Seals! There aren't any predators for them
in Milford Sound, so young males tend to 
flock here

We took a boat around Milford Sound (which is actually a fjord, not a sound: glacier formed, not river formed). Funny fact about the boat. It was a three-masted, engine driven affair built to look like the merchant ships that used to sail the coasts of New Zealand. However, all the sails were included with the boat, whoever built it neglected to add a keel... so you can't actually use the sails to move. Hence the engine.

We got up just before sunrise and got on the great big bus which would take us through the Southern Alps to the fiords on the other side. The bus driver was spectacularly hilarious. Here's a small taste of the running commentary he kept over the two-and-a-bit-hour (each way) drive:
"I'm your 'nature guide.' I have no qualifications, its just a fancy name for

We stopped off at the Mirror Lakes on the
way to Milford. I liked the sign :p

driver."
"My mother always said that little boys who tell lies grow up to become weather forecasters."
And this little joke the bus driver had as we wound our way along the narrow road cut into the cliff face of a mountain: "A little boy was talking to his granny after his grandad's funeral. He said, 'Granny, when I die, I want to go like grandad, nice and peacefully in my sleep. Not yelling and screaming, like the passengers on his bus as they went off a cliff'."
The commentator on the boat was equally amusing. As we were leaving: "Those of you who drove... make sure you have your cars..."

It was a sunny day; though this meant that we didn't get wet, it also means that most of the waterfalls along the walls of Milford Sound were dry. Fiordland, one of the wettest places on Earth (earth or Earth? earth for dirt, Earth for the planet?), is in the middle of a pretty bad drought, but nonetheless the drive and the fiord itself is still the most beautiful place I've seen down here so far. So much so, in fact, that I've stayed for an extra couple of days.

If you haven't noticed by now, I kind of like rocks. A lot. And general geology/natural history stuff. So if this sort of thing bores you, skip the next few paragraphs :p (but I'll keep it "short", I promise!)

As I mentioned, Milford Sound is not actually a Sound. Carved out by glacial movement, it is technically a fjord (I think they use the word fiord here, so I might be switching up my i's and j's. Hopefully iust jn that word though. Not all the rest of the tjme. ;) ) The Southern Alps of Fiordland are extremely young for mountains. They are located in one of the most geologically active parts of New Zealand, right on the Ring of Fire. There is a fault running right down the side of one of the mountains where no trees grow because it slips too often. The Pacific Plate is colliding with the Indo-Australlian plate, which has pushed up over 20km of crust to form the Southern Alps mountain range. But the mountains aren't actually 20km high :p - erosion has kept tabs on that, with the tallest mountain being Mount Cook, at 3754 metres. But back to the mountains right around Milford.

The pictures don't do much justice to the size of the place - those mountains around the edges are around 1700m high. The near-straight cliffs plunging down to the water keep going below the surface - the depth less than a boat-length away from the wall of the fjord was over 200 metres. Deep. The water had that same surreal blue-teal tint seen in the rivers along the west coast.

The icy water in the streams higher up in the mountains of Fiordland were unbelievably clear - and the most beautiful blue. Fun fact - these rivers stay the same colour during spring floods. The mountains don't have any topsoil - they're just exposed rock. The rock walls are so steep that if any soil tries to build up it is immediately washed away, thus when it pours, the flood water remains clear.

The valley floors are populated largely by beautiful red beech forests, with silver and alpine beech growing higher up. The walls of Milford Sound were largely covered by dense growths of beech forest. However, since there isn't much by way of dirt, to anchor themselves the roots of big swathes of trees are all tangled together. But sometimes one tree will lose its grip on the rock, and the weight of that one tree slipping is too much for the rest of the trees tangled in with it to hold up - so the whole swathe rips off the side of the mountain and goes plunging down to the fiord or valley below.

Avalanches are a little different in this area as well. You get the "usual" kind like those at home, but you also get giant snowballs which shoot off the side of the vertical cliffs, and plummet a kilometre or more to the valley floor. The fall, and the impact, creates wind bursts of up to 200 km/h, flattening trees in a radius around the fall.

The beech forests were beautiful. The streams were beautiful. Nice mountains, too. :p Milford Sound itself of course was quite spectacular. Saw lots of seals, and a brief glimpse of a couple of penguins. :)

Oooo I haven't talked about the tunnel, yet! So the road to the coast starts on a valley bottom (a big moraine grown over with forest) then starts climbing up the side of a big u-shaped glacial valley. A dead-end valley, with a very tall cliff face at the end. With a small hole in the side. A tunnel! The 1.2 km long Homer Tunnel. The tunnel was constructed starting on the higher side. When they got partway into the mountain though, they discovered that it wasn't solid rock. There were fissures inside the mountain with water flowing through - and they were effectively digging a hole. Which filled up with water. Quite quickly. So pumps had to be brought in to drain the tunnel until they broke out the other side.

Lovely place. Also the most like home. I think I've been rather spoiled in the gorgeous scenery department, growing up in the East Kootenays.

This morning Janna and I drove to Invercargill so she could catch her flight to Christchurch. After dropping her off at the airport, I headed a little further south to Bluff, the almost-but-not-quite-southernmost tip of the South Island. Went for a lovely walk through some native forest (for once, the cicada's weren't making a racket - instead I got to listen to warblers singing for an hour and a half. It was marvellous), then got back in the car and drove back to Te Anau.



The lake here at Te Anau is the 2nd biggest in NZ by area after Taupo (the big one in the middle of the north island), and the largest in terms of water volume (its quite deep. Again, glacier formed - carved out by receding glaciers then filled with melt water as we came out of the last glacial maximum). (Don't cite me on any of this, I'm just going by memory of what I read and only occasionally verify my facts before posting :p ).

I passed lots of sheep and deer farms. On the way to Bluff there was even a stretch of farms with big white tail deer. Some of the sheep had been sheared, while others were still fluffy. Sometimes there was a mix of the two in one field. I wonder if the shorn sheep feel embarrassed when they have to go stand with the fluffy ones...





Also, my shoes are falling apart. Now water and small particles of forest floor sneak up on my toes. I love these shoes. They have been wonderful. Maybe I can glue them back together...