New Zealand, Milford Sound: Boat Journey Through an Incredible Fiord

In the morning, after spending an evening in a picnic area outside the small New Zealand town of Milton, we both woke up freezing. An extreme cold front had moved into the area during the night and we felt the intense cold upon rising, since our campervan heater only worked when we were plugged into a power site at a holiday park. The option of hanging out in our freezing cold campervan, which we nicknamed "Bessie" for the duration of our month-long road trip across the North Island and South Island, New Zealand's two main islands, was not a desired option, so we cooked a hot breakfast before hitting the road to get on with the long drive to Milford Sound.

Breakfast that morning consisted of scrambled eggs, bacon that we had purchased a couple of days earlier at Dunedin's Saturday Farmers Market, toast and tea. After the cooked breakfast, we were no longer shivering and were soon driving along the highway, excited to cross the South Island and finally reach its west coast, where we would start working our way up north to see beautiful fiords, incredible glaciers and many other interesting things.

Our boat driver swerved into the base of the waterfall and got as close as he could without sinking the ship

Soon after we left the picnic area that served as home for a night, we stopped off at the small town of Balclutha to buy petrol, since Bessie was running low and we didn't want to find ourselves stuck at the side of the road, unable to go anywhere. Balclutha was the southernmost town we had visited, and would visit, during our around-the-world trip in 2007, so stopping there marked a milestone for us. To keep with the habit we developed at the start of our New Zealand adventure, we shared a meat pie we had bought inside the petrol station, and it was there that we found out a snowstorm had added a white blanket to the top of some nearby hills, thus proving that it was, indeed, very cold!

Gore was the biggest town between Milton and Te Anau (pronounced "tay uh-now"), the town where we ended up staying the night before making our way into Fiordland National Park the next day, where we boarded a boat to commence our journey along the incredible Milford Sound. Since we were ahead of schedule for our South Island itinerary, we decided to take our time getting to Te Anau and chill out for a few hours in Gore, since it was a nice enough town. Gore was in the Southlands region of New Zealand, the country's southernmost area.

The weather before we arrived in Gore had turned worse. It was very windy and the sky was turning dark as the clouds thickened and blotted out the sun; heavy rains mixed with snow and ice pelted our windshield as Kyle drove along the small highway. Yes, this was in late spring! In Gore, after we parked Bessie in a small square with an enormous statue of a trout, which signified the fact that Gore was famous for its trout fishing, we walked to a nice little cafe, Ambience, on the town's main street. The temperature outside must have been close to freezing point (0 degrees Celsius, or 32 degrees Fahrenheit); we felt the chill through our clothes and deep in our bones.

Hot coffees were a necessity to remove the chill and we each ordered lattes whilst sharing a couple of pieces of cake. The rain/snow/ice hadn't hit us yet when we first parked our vehicle in Gore, but as soon as we sat down with our coffees, the storm reached the town centre, and large pieces of hail were dropping down hard from the sky. Wanting to wait out the storm, we stayed in the cafe until they closed, working on our travel journal and enjoying the cosy, warm interior, and "ambience", of the place.

We chatted with some friendly people in the cafe, and their three adorable, but hard to understand, little kids named Tom, Maggie and Penny. The family actually invited us to stay at their farm for the night, but we weren't sure, at that point in our journey, whether or not we had enough time to add that to our itinerary, so we politely declined and were sad to miss out on more close encounters with sheep and other animals, and the chance to see a working farm up close.

When Ambience closed, it was only 5:00pm and not yet dark, so we moved to a bar called "Howl at the Moon" to have some juice and continue working on the journal. We had gotten a lot done in Ambience and we wanted to keep the momentum going, so spent a few hours at the next place before finally calling it quits and heading back to our vehicle to continue our drive for the day. There was a brief pit stop at a Woolworth's supermarket before making it back to Bessie, and then we were on our way, in the dark; it had gotten dark by the time we left Woolworth's, but we didn't have very much driving left to make it to Te Anau.

Our one and only chance of contributing to the eradication of the Australian brushtail possum, one of New Zealand's most destructive pests, failed miserably. It was very dark and we were so excited to see a live possum on the road that Kyle swerved to avoid hitting it. Thinking back, we definitely should have ploughed (that's the same as plowed for the Americans reading this, just a different spelling) over it, thinking that it would help save the wood pigeons, a threatened species of birds that you will read about in our next journal entry. You'll also find out more in that story as to why it would have been beneficial to kill the possum; we aren't animal haters or anything like that.

Our arrival in Te Anau was around 9:00pm and everything had either closed for the evening or was in the process of closing, so we parked Bessie at the side of the road by Lake Te Anau and hung out in the campervan for the remainder of the evening. Since we hadn't showered that morning due to the cold weather in the Milton area, we went ahead and took turns quickly showering that evening, making sure that we limited each shower to five minutes so we wouldn't run out of water; the water heater ran on gas instead of electricity, which thankfully meant that we could use the shower anywhere we parked. Five minutes was a good amount of time to guarantee that the hot water would not run out, and it helped that we turned the water off whilst lathering up with soap or working shampoo through our hair.

Once we had each finished in the campervan's tiny shower, we made chicken sandwiches and ate them before eating some muffins that we had bought in the Gore Woolworth's. It was still before midnight when we finished eating and we both read our books before going to sleep. Sleep came easy that evening; we had somehow tired ourselves out by doing very little but driving and drinking coffees for a large portion of the day. The next day would present an adventure to us; we were both excited about seeing Milford Sound and the fantastic scenery we had read about, which rivals that of Norway's fiords.

In the morning, we peeked out of the campervan and saw Lake Te Anau at its best. The sky was clear and the water was very calm. To figure out what we were going to do that day, Kyle went to the I-Site (information centre) to find out about boat trips along Milford Sound. Dan took advantage of the time he was waiting for him to return, by telephoning his family back in England. When Kyle returned back to the campervan with a couple of coffees, Dan knew it was time to go and he finished his call. The campervan was already packed away and ready to depart, but we both sat down for a few minutes to enjoy the coffees before starting up the engine.

It was just after 10:00am when Kyle booked us onto a boat that would cruise along the sound. The boat was scheduled to depart at 12:45pm, and we only had a couple of hours to get to the pier in time to check in for our cruise. The drive from Te Anau to Milford Sound was around 75 miles and took a couple of hours because of stops we made along the way; the roads were often curvy and ran along rivers and through mountain valleys. All around us, we saw picturesque snow-capped mountains, thick New Zealand forests, lakes and rivers under an incredibly beautiful blue sky. During the drive, we saw a little stoat run across the road, but we didn't hit it, either, even though it is a destructive pest, like the possum.

Towards the end of the drive, less than 13 miles away from the ferry pier, we drove along really steep roads and through a long tunnel carved out of a huge vertical mountain wall. When we emerged from the other side, we saw amazing views of several snow-capped mountains and the valley between them, and we then started driving several hundred feet down in elevation. On the way down, we got stuck behind a few slow drivers, and that caused us to miss our boat, which left as soon as we made it to the pier. At the ticket office, we blamed slow buses for us being late, even though we had stopped a few times to take photos, and the man working at the desk put us on the next boat, with a larger viewing deck, at no extra cost.

The larger viewing deck was a bonus, since we were still lucky with clear blue skies and slightly warm weather during the afternoon cruise. The boat had plenty of room on board and up top on the viewing platform; therefore, we didn't feel crowded, which would have been the case on the smaller boat that we were initially booked onto for the trip. The views from the top of the boat were excellent and we spent most of our time looking out to either side of the boat in awe of the steep, vertical cliff faces that made up the walls of the fiord.

At the start of the journey, we chatted with an Australian man from Sydney and ended up talking with him for most of trip out to the Tasman Sea. At different points throughout the journey, we saw wildlife along the edges of the fiord: a cute Fiordland crested penguin and a few New Zealand fur seals. As there had been heavy rains for the past couple of days, many waterfalls were spilling vast amounts of water into the sea, creating an impressive sight.

Our boat had many Asian tourists on board, and it even had a special Japanese bento box menu as one of the lunch options, should anyone have wanted to eat during the two-hour cruise. Some of the tourists were served meals with several courses, and drank wine and beer throughout the journey, so we were not surprised when groups of them decided to take a nap during the journey back to the ferry pier, after we had made it to the Tasman Sea and the end of the fiord. We noticed the warmth in the lower deck with the sun pouring through the large windows of the vessel, creating a sleep-inducing atmosphere for anyone who had hit the heavy food and drinks (we didn't, so were wide awake).

We mentioned the fact that the boat glided past several waterfalls. On the way back from the end of the fiord, at Stirling Falls, our boat driver swerved into the base of the waterfall and got as close as he could without sinking the ship. As a result, everyone on the top viewing platform got completely soaked. The driver warned everyone, but it seemed as though only the English-speaking tourists on board understood the warning and avoided getting wet. It was quite funny to see unaware passengers figuring out that the boat wasn't turning away from the waterfall, but heading straight into it, and a little too late!

When the boat pulled back into the ferry terminal, we rushed back to the campervan to get on the road and beat the other vehicles, namely the tour buses, so we could drive back without being slowed down by larger vehicles. We passed several sections of the road with large patches of snow on the side, from avalanches that had occurred recently, and took some obligatory photos of us standing in the snow. We were heading to Queenstown next and really wanted to get there quickly, so Kyle sped along the highways, going 20km/h (12 mph) over the 100km/h (62 mph) speed limit. There was hardly any traffic and we rarely, if ever, saw any police cars in New Zealand, but, during that journey, we did pass a police car and luckily had slowed down to the 100 km/h speed limit just in the nick of time. When the car passed us and was far enough away, our speed went back up, and that was when a tragedy occurred.

Bessie killed a sparrow that day. The poor little thing was just trying to cross the road, and she decided to ram her enormous front section into the bird. We saw the sparrow hit the top of the campervan and bounce off and into the air before spiralling down to the ground. It landed on the road behind us and bounced a couple of times, but was (hopefully) dead upon impact. We were sickened with the murder of such an innocent creature and we admonished Bessie by not washing her windows for a few days. After that, she didn't kill any more birds in New Zealand.

We stopped along the road to Queenstown in order to take photos of some gorgeous scenery. At one stop after we passed through the tiny town of Kingston, we looked out across a large field full of sheep at the edge of Lake Wakatipu, with many mountains in the distance. A Kiwi woman had stopped at the same place to take the same photos we were capturing, and she explained to us that Queenstown was just on the other side of the lake, nestled within the mountains that were standing off in the distance. The woman was very interesting and we wished that we would have had more time to talk with her; she had just completed a one-week conservation course on the south coast of the South Island that sounded like something we both would have thoroughly enjoyed.

The drive from that viewpoint to Queenstown was along the shore of the lake and the road climbed and descended often, as it snaked it way towards Queenstown. We knew that there was a Top 10 Holiday Park in Queenstown, and since we liked that chain of holiday parks, and knew it would be a good place to base ourselves, we headed there once we arrived in town. They luckily had a campervan power site available; we needed power to recharge Bessie's batteries, since we had slept in picnic areas or at the side of the road for the past three nights. We also wanted to base ourselves in one place for a few days, so we booked ourselves into the holiday park for the next three nights.