A Celebration of Fifty Years 2012: November 5: Our First Day in Sydney

An other-worldly sunset from our hotel in Te Anau

Another few days jam-packed with activities have passed and we have said our adieus to our new friends and departed from Wellington, our last stop in New Zealand. Now we are in the Sir Stamford on Circular Quay Hotel just steps from the Sydney Harbor, but I will save that for another post. Our new friend Trish, who lives in Sydney, has graciously volunteered to squire us about on Thursday but in the meantime it is Monday morning and I am feverishly trying to get caught up so that Tom and I can take one of those Hop On-Hop Off bus tours of the city.

After leaving idyllic Mt. Cook several days ago, we boarded our Cessna yet again, this time heading to the little lakeside resort of Te Anau which would be our base for exploring Fiordland and Milford Sound. We had drinks and pizza in the hotel bar overlooking beautiful Lake Te Anau. The sunset was spectacular.

Fiordland National Park is a large area at the Southwestern part of the South Island. It encompasses three million acres and was literally untouched until the 1970’s, with very little or no sun from May to October. But now there are sheep and deer farms and the fly fishing is spectacular with huge brown and rainbow trout who entice fisherpeople into the icy waters of the abundant rivers.

In order to get to Milford Sound, we boarded a van for a two- thour drive along the Milford Road, or “Avalanche Alley”, which our guide assured us was fraught with danger but we were lucky it was open at all. Just three weeks earlier a huge rock avalanche had closed the road requiring much heavy equipment to remove the debris. The largest rock blocking the road was a 500-ton boulder of black granite, which one could imagine could create some difficulties. And oh by the way, this is the second most dangerous road in the world for avalanches---trees, rocks and snow come flying off the mountainside with great regularity and road closures are common. Signs along the road advise vehicles to Keep Moving, No Stopping, etc., but it brought to mind a snow avalanche several years ago in Colorado, which stopped seven cars in their tracks on I-70. One minute you are driving along the highway at 75 miles an hour and the next you are buried under a mountain of snow. Miraculously, no one died in that avalanche. Here, on the road to Milford Sound, the trees can be uprooted following a heavy rainfall taking the entire root system with them, which knocks the rocks which carry the snow, and Bang you are but a distant memory if you are unlucky enough to be in their path. Luckily, we did not experience this first-hand. Our guide kept a running commentary as we made our way. What’s the difference between a fiord and a sound someone asked. A fiord is carved by ice and a sound is carved by water. Millions of years ago one presumes. Ahead was Disappearing Mountain, so called because the fog is usually so thick the mountain disappears from view. The road cuts through a dense forest of beech trees. We did stop for a few minutes at the Mirror Lakes, a picturesque series of tarns known for the beautiful reflections of the mountains on a calm windless day. Apparently there aren’t too many of those.

Finally we arrived at the boat harbor of Milford Sound. It was raining pretty steadily by now as we boarded a large tourist boat with a viewing deck and inside cabin with tables and seating. A box lunch was waiting for us. Spectacular granite cliffs line both sides of the sound and waterfalls twice the height of Niagara Falls pour from the top of the cliffs at every turn. The water beneath our boat is 500 feet deep. An announcer told us not to panic, that the crew was fully qualified to panic on our behalf, so we sat back and relaxed as the boat pulled out of the harbor. Although it was raining, the waterfalls are only visible in the rain, so I suppose we were fortunate to have a bit of weather. As we motored up the sound, we saw penguins and fur seals on the rocks, but the weather was too misty to get pictures of them.

Back on the van to return over the avalanche prone Milford Road, we stopped to look at some kea birds—they look just like parrots but they are a muddy brown color with a green tinge under the wings. We returned to Te Anau to meet our pilot and fly to Queenstown.