Sounds stunning

April 13, 2005

Rapidly running out of time in New Zealand I decided the best way to get to see Milford Sound would be a day trip from Queenstown so I booked a tour with Great Sights, choosing them over all the others basically for the sole reason that I had a 10% discount card.
The tour is a long day leaving Queenstown at 7.20 and reaching Milford Sound in time for the 1.30 boat cruise and eventually making it back to Queenstown at 7.45.
The drive to Milford Sound features, not surprisingly, stunning scenery and is supposedly one of the best alpine drives in the world.
We were incredibly lucky as the weather was fantastic, sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. Milford is a very wet part of the world so there is usually a lot of mist obscuring your views of the mountains and valleys.
Along the way we stopped at various places for photos, including the Mirror Lakes which give great reflections if the mountains.
Milford Sound was actually incorrectly named as it was created by a glacier and should therefore really be called a fiord. A sound is caused by erosion but the explorers who found it didn't know this at the time.
Milford Sound has been called the Eighth Wonder of the World, and with damn good reason. It was stunning. Huge tree covered, snow topped mountains dropping straight to the waters edge.
Truly beautiful.