Strike Notice

Lyn here, Barry’s gone on strike for the night and refuses to write.

We woke up to a lovely sunny day, looked promising for our trip to Milford Sound, 120kms from where we are in Te Anau.  For those who don’t know about this place, it’s a one way in and one way out, the same way, terminal where you take a boat cruise along the fiord, It’s not really a sound. Today we’re lucky because the road has been closed since last Friday due to a landslide and only a portion of a road opened up yesterday afternoon and was only open from 10a.m. till 5p.m. today and will likely be closed again tomorrow due to heavy rain that is forecast. The drive there was amazing, first it was a fairly flat valley and then the mountains closed in and we went fairly high, about 850m., at that point they decided to put a tunnel in to take us to the other side of that particular mountain. I would imagine at this point the scenery would be very much like the Alps, I’ve never been. We were also at the snow line and it was exceedingly cold about 2C.

View From the Passenger Seat

General View

General View

Tunnel Entrance

Having been told to expect long delays at the landslide sight we had left in plenty of time only to find when we got there, there was no other traffic and the GO sign was turned our way as soon as we stopped, needless to say we were a little early for our cruise. We had thought there might be a small town there that we could walk around but no there is a cafe and the cruise terminal. Unfortunately although the sun was shining there was a bitterly cold wind. We did stay on the outside deck for a while. The boat sailed along close to the edge of the fiord and a couple of times decided to go right in under the waterfalls, a few mad people got a little wet. There were a lot of awesome waterfalls, some large and some small, just a lot of water coming down from the tops. We were very privileged and the guide spotted a couple of rare Crested Penguins so again the skipper went in very close to shore, they’re very small penguins and not easy to spot.

Crested Penguins

Further on we spotted some fur seals basking on the rocks. Apparently these are the young male seals that have been thrown out of the colony, they hang around here and get fat and strong and then go back and claim some females.

NZ Fur Seals

We were out for about 2 hours and the scenery was just unbelievable. Unfortunately towards the end of the sail the weather began to change, the clouds moved in. On our drive back to the motel we encountered quite a bit of snow and rain and then drove into sunshine again the further away we got from the mountains. All in all an awesome day.