Milford Sound

Today was a busy day. We started by driving just under two hours to get to Milford Sound in time for our 10:30 day cruise. It was a two hour cruise that took us through the sound all the way to the open ocean. It was beautiful! Even though it's called a sound it's actually a fiord since it was carved by glaciers. So it had huge steep rock faces on either side of the water. This region is the wettest part of New Zealand and gets on average 7 meters of rain annually. Meters! Last year they got 9.8 meters of rain. So we were extremely lucky to have clear sunny skies today. All of the rain drains into the sound and because of that there is a layer of dark fresh rain water, which looks almost like tea since it's been running along the bottom of the forest floor, that stays on top of the clear salt water. The dark rain water on top causes marine life below to think they are deeper than they really are. This is why there is a bunch of marine life in the sound that you can normally only find in very deep water, which makes it a really good scuba diving site.

The boat we were on was a smaller cruise boat than the others, so we were able to get closer to the cliffs and things. We were standing at the very front of the boat (the bow) and a couple of times they got us so close to a water fall that we actually got wet from it. We also got to see some New Zealand fur seals! We saw them a couple of times just lounging on some rocks so the boat took us really close for some pictures.

Once we got closer to the open ocean we also saw some dolphins! They were bottle-nose dolphins so they were bigger than the dolphins we swam with in Kaikoura. They were playing and leaping right next to the boat.

So we were really happy with our cruise experience. We went through Milford Cruise New Zealand.

After the cruise we headed back towards Te Anau and did some of the many hikes along the way. The first one we did was just a quick 20 min round trip to see the Chasm. It's this water-fall like area where the rock has been formed by the water and swirls around so deep it almost looks like it's going directly back into the center of the Earth. It was interesting. Also the short walk there and back was through the rain-forest area so it was very green and lush.

The second hike was our longest of the day; it was quoted as a 3 hour return trip but we did it in 2 hour and 15 min. It was the Routeburn Track for the first hour until you get to the Key Summit track. It was a pretty steady incline for the first part and then pretty steep for the last half hour. My garmin activity tracker died, otherwise I'd be able to tell you how many flights of stairs we climbed. This area is called The Divide because it's where one huge glacier divided up into 3 glaciers that carved different tracks down the mountains. From the top we had beautiful panoramic views of the Humboldt and Darran Mountains. At the top there was also a self-guided nature walk which was really interesting. It was marshy and lots of bogs up there. According to the signs along the path there were really unique vegetation up there as well. It's estimated that these were left behind as the glaciers passed through the area. We could also see Lake Marian from here which is a beautiful alpine lake situated in a hanging valley surrounded by mountains. 

Our last was a small ten minute walk along Mirror Lakes. The idea is similar to Lake Matheson which we saw a few days ago; a few times of day the lake is really still and reflects the mountain scenery behind it. This time it worked out a little better for us but there were still some ducks that were stirring things up and causing ripples so we didn't get a perfect reflection. 

We ended the day by eating dinner on the patio of a local restaurant. They played country music and we ate burgers so we felt like we were back home. I drove to the restaurant! My first time driving on the left side of the road. I did pretty well other than turning on my windshield wipers instead of my blinker a couple of times.