There is a little town between Queenstown and Milford Sound called Te Anau which is also the start of another Great Walk, the Kepler Track which leads along the Lake Manapouri. Again, we walked a little part of the walk, just enough to see the lake. The good thing about the Great Walks is, that even though quite big advertised and therefore very well maintained, not too many tourists actually do the walks why it’s relatively quiet and undisturbed. That’s why we sat at the lake for around 30 minutes without seeing any people. Unbelievable idyllic.
We booked a ship cruise for 9am the next day and that’s why we drove a bit in direction of Milford Sound the same evening. There are only around 100km between Te Anau and Milford Sound but one needs at least two hours to drive it excluding any stop for taking pictures. The road leads over the mountains along a pass which obviously takes a lot of time to drive. We spent the night on a camp ground with an unbelievable view on the Milky Way, but there was full moon which destroyed any chance for a good picture.
We decided to take a 9 o’clock ship cruise for two reasons. First it costs only half of the price as a ship cruise during lunchtime. On the other hand we already heard that these ship cruises are far less crowded than the later ones. This was definitely true! There were quite a few people on the ship, but there was enough space to walk around and take pictures (even though most of the waterfalls were dried out because of the too sunny weather). However, we saw some seals, a gold line (as it is a world heritage area, any mining is forbidden) and three active waterfalls (one of them were the world famous Stirling Falls). Milford Sound is part of the Fjordland National Park, and it’s so famous because it is the fjord which is best accessible for tourists. The ship cruise was quite impressive anyway, Mitre Peak with 1692m high (the highest mountain in Milford Sound), green mountains out of the water, some of them with white summits. What a beautiful place in New Zealand.
In the afternoon we made some stops (a lot of lookouts, waterfalls and the Mirror Lake) while driving over Queenstown (where we bought a second pair of sleeping bags because it was extremely cold the night before) to Wanaka. There we spent a second night in the car in order to drive to the West Coast the next day. On the way there were again a lot of little walks, waterfalls, a Blue Pool (which definitely deserves its name) and a wonderful beach (Ship Creek). One highlight of most of these locations is, that they are full of flat sanded stones, which are perfect to construct beautiful little towers with, a fact Tobi directly took advantage of 🙂
At the end of the day, we arrived at our next destination of the program, the Fox Glacier where we found a HelpX Host in a Motel. However, this (kind of sad) story will be part of the next blog…