Milford Sound – Pining for the Fiords

Next stop was to the remotest corner of New Zealand – Milford Sound.   Rudyard Kipling called it the "Eighth wonder of the world" and it is named for Milford Haven in South Wales.  The words in the previous sentence are not friends.  It's also one of the wettest places in the world, having about 6.5 meters of rain per year - which would make the Welsh namesake slightly more apt, I guess.

It's one of the least explored places in New Zealand, as the original European explorers (Captain Cook et al.) sailed past it's narrow entry from the Tasman sea, and until the Mackinnon Pass was found and documented, it was hard to find by land either.  These days you approach by way of the Homer Tunnel, which itself is impressive as its walls are raw unlined granite around a dimly-lit 1:10 incline.

None of the sounds in this area (Milford, Doubtful, Dusky and nine others) are actually sounds; they’re fiords.  The difference is that sounds are formed gradually by moving water; fiords by glacial erosion.  But the names have too much traction now, so they just called the area Fiordland by way of a semantic bandaid later.  Sailors, eh?

We stayed at a lodge on the other side of the tunnel, which had some pretty spectacular views of one of the lakes.  Internet service was dire, though. Apparently sharing a satellite connection with a legion of crusty backpackers wipes out your bandwidth.  FFS, better look outside instead then.

It's alright, I guess. 

The area's one irritation are the omnipresent swarms of sandflies - small, fat gnat-shaped bugs, whose females are partial to people blood.
From Wiki:

New Zealand sandflies have a native Māori legend wherein "the god Tu-te-raki-whanoa had just finished creating the landscape of Fiordland, it was absolutely stunning... so stunning that it stopped people from working. They just stood around gazing at the beauty instead. The goddess Hinenuitepo became angry at these unproductive people, so she created the sandfly to bite them and get them moving"

It's as good an explanation as any.

We took a boat tour of the fiord as far as the inlet to the Tasman sea.

I bought a bottle of the local "Spruce" beer while on board- a brew originally concocted by Captain Cook using the local rimu tree, which is naturally high in vitamin C.  I can see how a beer that prevented scurvy might've appealed to his men.  It tastes like beer with pine needles floating in it, but not totally unpleasant.  At 10am, some would argue it was a bit early to be drinking,  but I felt it added to the authenticity of the event.

The constant rainfall and snowmelt make for several permanent and many temporary waterfalls, the biggest of which is the 155 metre Stirling Falls:

There are a colony of seals here, too.  They apparently hate the sandflies even more than us, so have found a remote ledge where they are less of a problem.

There is an underwater observatory on the north side of the fiord, where one can descend 10 metres and observe the creatures like black coral which, normally deep-water, can exist in the relatively shallow waters of Milford Sound because of the tannin-stained fresh water layer on the surface of the water here.

And here are some more pretty pictures from the local area, :

 

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Ich weiß nicht wie sagt man "Sound" auf Deutsch, aber es macht nichts, weil es die falsche name für dies ort ist.  Es ist ein Fjord. Jedenfalls ist es ein ganz besonderer und schöner Ort, aber es gibt zu viele blutsaugende Fliegen.

Bimbling around Otago

We left Blenheim and were sucked straight into another winery in the next county.  I was driving so I had to make do with poncy Organic cola and lunch. Chan selflessly tried enough for both of us, though.

On the drive we happened across a fur seal colony.  They were a bit of a timesink to be honest. You'd think you'd seen them all then then you'd notice that the boulders nearby were another dozen of them. Also, their barks sound like the wailing of the damned, which really harshes my vibe.

So the next stop was Oamaru – a town with far too many vowels given that they are the Kiwis’ natural enemy. It is a town that is big on vintage.  Neo-classical buildings abound and antique shops are aplenty.

What was a big draw for Chan though was the presence of the nearby penguin colonies.  There are two main colonies: one of Blue Penguins and one of Yellow-eyed Penguins.  If penguins gonna represent, they gotta wear their colours, you dig?



As we have seen the definitive colony of Blue penguins on a previous trip to Phillip Island in Australia, Chan tasked us with getting up at Oh-my-sweet-baby-Jesus O’clock to try and see one or two of the 15 yellow-eyed penguins who live on Bushy Beach.  Last year was hard on the local Yellow-eyes, as disease and other unfortunatenesses had depleted their numbers – hence the only remaining 7 breeding pairs plus change. That, combined with their natural disinclination toward people, means you have to spot them from a hide on the hill.  They get up at sunrise and go fishing for the day, before coming ashore at some point in the evening and hiding in their burrows, meaning you have to catch them on the way out. I was pessimistic about our chances -especially as this was rearing season so half the penguins would be home watching the kids- and Chan was going to throw a right tantrum if we didn’t see anything, even though this was her idea.  Thankfully, we caught a couple of the late risers.  Blurry, unprepared penguin action shots ahoy:

 

Apparently the water was as cold as it looked, if this guy’s reaction is anything to go by:

One rather different place that Oamaru has is the Steampunk HQ  - a museum/installation filled with various artefacts done in the ‘Steampunk’ style.  For the uninitiated, Steampunk is a genre of fiction, art or dress-up (sorry, Cosplay) which is best described as science-fiction from a Victorian perspective.  So airships, trains, flamboyant vacuum-tube electrical devices and steam power feature heavily. So Jules Verne and HG Wells would give you the right idea.

We saw some weird shit.

On the drive from Oamaru to Dunedin, we stopped to look at the Moeraki Boulders, which I artfully managed to photograph while keeping the legions of dickheads doing yoga poses on the rocks out of shot.

That's no moon

Dunedin (which is Edinburgh in Gaelic, by the way) is good for some ridiculously photogenic landscape.   We took a drive up to the Otago Peninsula, on which it resides.

Mind you, nothing was open again for dinner, so we ended up cooking for ourselves before my hungrygrump hit critical.

Since this post is more pretty pictures than substance, I'll mention the following day when we were driving to Milford Sound.  We pulled into the sensibly named Nugget Point, home of a prominent and still-active lighthouse which looks down on the rocks which were historically a significant hazard to small vessels to and from the nearby Clutha river.  It makes for some good photos:

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben Pinguine und Robben gesehen.  Wir besucht auch eine seltsame Museum.