January 4th - Milford Sound

Today we did go to Milford Sound! And I’ve never, ever, in my entire life, seen such amazing scenery. I don’t have the words for it – Milford Sound is actually a fjord, hand-carved by a glacier at some point in the past, and also added to by various earthquakes from time to time.
The road there was humungeously scenic in its own right, and as for the Homer tunnel, which went right through sheer rock, it was so scary, I asked Rob to do that part of the journey, both there and back. Straight out of a James Bond movie, except that, thankfully, there were no baddies shooting at us from fast moving sinister black cars. Rob was pomming the theme tune though, as we went down the hairpin bends…
We went on a cruise up the sound (or down it, seeing as we went right to the sea), and it was unbelievably amazing. Rob was overflowing with enthusiasm for it for about three hours solid, and as you know, Rob doesn’t often do out-and-out wow-that-was-amazing – that’s more my line. The landscape was on a scale I’ve never seen before – enormous rock faces sheer up to the sky. And so male – nothing female about it at all, despite the vegetation clinging to every available surface.
I’ve persuaded Rob to only add a few of the pictures he took (wait til we get home, and edit this blog some more), but he ran the battery down on the camera again. It wasn’t all him, as I saw more birds – a black-fronted tern ( no picture) and several Kea in the wild (picture), but it mostly was!