Having being told to allow 2 3/4 hours for the 120 Km drive to Milford Sound, we left the motel at 7:30 AM. The traffic was very light, with no buses, and the road is excellent for the first 90 Km, so after a 6 minute wait at the one-way Homer Tunnel, we arrived in Milford Sound at 9:15 for our 10:15 cruise.
The Homer Tunnel was an interesting experience - it is about 1.2 Km long and has a 10% downward slope towards Milford Sound. The tunnel is unlined so has lots of water dripping down and the road surface was quite uneven. You emerge on the Milford end into a snow shed, and are then faced with a series of hairpin turns to take you down into the valley....slow for the buses and nerve wracking for the tourists.
Milford Sound settlement consists of two lodges and the dock for the various tour operators. You have to park 10 minutes from the dock, and surprisingly there are no cafés and no gift shops in the dock area. Remarkable to still have a place were you don't have to exit through the gift shop.
Our "cruise" was about 2 hours and the naturalist was very good at explaining what we were seeing and some of the history of the area. We got up close and personal with several waterfalls that cascaded down from hanging valleys and saw a penguin and two lots of fur seals. We also learned that Milford is a fjord not a sound, if you really want to get technical about it. The sound is well hidden from the ocean, with Captain Cook in 1769 thinking it was a bay, and it taking another hundred years before anyone realized that it was a sound / fjord.
The weather was somewhat overcast making a lot of my iPhone photos fairly dark, but these should give you some idea of what we saw.
No visit to Milford Sound would be complete without taking a photo of Mitre Peak from the end of the sound, a scene as iconic to Kiwis as the view of Lake Louise from the chateau is to Canadians. It would have looked more impressive without the cloud cover.
On the return journey we had a 5 minute wait at the Homer a tunnel, time to get out of the car and take some photos.
We stopped at a couple of spots along the road home, including The Chasm and Mirror Lake, but still made it back to the motel by 4 PM. The Chasm was a very deep river channel carved out over thousands of years and Mirror Lake is of course very reflective when there is not a breeze blowing.
Tomorrow we are off to Gore.
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