Milford Sound - day 62

When we got up this morning, everything outside was all white; it had snowed all night! We took the Kiwi Experience bus for a daytrip to Milford Sound, in the south west corner of the South Island of New Zealand. Milford Sound is a fiord inside the Fiordland National Park and is one of the most spectacular places you could imagine. It is actually a 5-hour drive away from Queenstown, but the drive is one of the best parts of the trip. On the way we stopped in Te Anau, a town that's on the edge of New Zealand's 2nd largest lake. We also stopped several times to take some nice pictures, including at the Mirror Lakes and the famous tunnel through the mountain. All morning there was a big snowstorm, so everything was all white and it made the scenery incredibly beautiful! The Fiordland National Park is just amazing because the road through it is surrounded by very high mountain peaks and impressive valleys. One of them is known as the Valley of a Thousand Waterfalls because when it rains the water just comes falling down from everywhere! (which was the case when we were there) Once we got to Milford Sound, we boarded a boat called the Pride of Milford and went on a 2 hour cruise. It started off with an amazing lunch buffet where we ate as much as we could. Then we went outside to enjoy the scenery and we actually stayed there eventhough it was really really very cold!! The boat went all the way til the end of the fiord where it mixes with the Tasman Sea. The top layer of Milford Sound is fresh water due to all the rainfall (they get an average of 9 meters of rain per year!!! and we thought England was a rainy country...), but the bottom is salt water. We saw some Fiordland crested penguins and later on some seals. We turned around and went back into the fiord. We came by lots of nice waterfalls and mountain peaks. The snow on the mountains made the scenery even more spectacular. The boat dropped us off at an underwater observatory where we went down to 10 meters below sea level to look at the fish and the coral. It's a pretty special observatory because you get to see deep sea fish that would usually live at around 60 meters depth in the ocean, but due to the dark fresh water layer on top of the salt water, you can see them in much shallower water in the fiord. We saw some black coral (weird name since the coral is actually white...), which apparently is very special because Milford Sound is the only place where you can access and see that coral so easily. After that we took the boat back to the pier and then the bus back to Queenstown. Just before leaving we saw Mitre Peak, the highest mountain in the world to come directly out of the sea; a pretty impressive sight! Anyway, the drive was slightly shorter on the way back because we didn't stop for pictures; also, we fell asleep and watched Ice Age, so the time went by pretty fast. We got back to Queenstown around 20h30, had dinner and then went to the Red Rock bar with some friends from the bus.

Weather: snowstorm nearly all day except for some sun every now and then; very very very cold...