Terra Bella

February 7

Wow. Just... wow. I suppose that for consistency's sake I should tell you that we woke up this morning at 9:00, that it rained last night so Zach and Wes got in the tent, that we had oatmeal and raisins but that we were out of brown sugar so we used jelly instead (except for me – I just had the raisins). But really the only story from today is the mountains, the fjord, and the most outrageously beautiful drive I have been on in my life.

Te Anau -> Milford Sound

I was a little unhappy this morning. I can't say for sure why. Maybe it was the discovery that I had left my jeans – the ones I got for Christmas, the only long pants I had with me on the road trip – in our hostel in Queenstown. Maybe it was because my new NZ cell phone no longer seemed to work. Maybe I was just a little cranky from being on the road so long. Whatever the reason, I was – in the middle of summer on the south island of New Zealand, for crying out loud – feeling a little curdled. And so it was that the first stop we made this morning at Mirror Lakes didn't strike me as all that great. Yeah, they were kind of reflective, but what water isn't? They certainly weren't mirrors. Well... well they did reflect the plants at the edge of the lake surprisingly well. And that upside- down sign that you can only read in its reflection is kind of cute. But I just want to get back on the road so I can sit and type.

I finished said typing and had just entered the "poweroff" command (I love Linux) when we pulled into the next scenic lookout. "Oh," I thought, "I guess I could go out." And I did. We all stood at the edge looking out. Yeah, it was a big mountain. But we'd seen bigger ones yesterday. And more of them. And in a more wide open area.

Whatever.

I was actually faintly irritated with how big a deal the others were making with the sight. "And it's supposed to just keep getting better!" "Someone called this the best drive in the world!". Oh boy. I don't know if I'm going to be up for this.

Faint irritation.

I really want to impress upon you how much I was not in the mood to give praise lightly. I want you to understand that I didn't see how this could be such a special drive, and that when we very first started, I was quite convinced it wasn't. I want you to see how very much I was wrong.

We were back in the car, Zach driving, I looking glassy-eyed out the window, when a waterfall flashed by. It was... it was pretty cool, actually. I, uh... I wish I could have gotten a picture of that. I look to the front of the car and see that we are passing one of those gorgeous rivers that New Zealand has strewn casually about itself, as if they're no big deal. I... you know it wouldn't be so bad if we stopped here. Sure enough, Zach is pulling over.

Nice.

We get out of the car and before I realize it, Ian is blazing a trail through the grass and a few trees to get to the river. I quickly follow. Starting to warm up to the scenery again, I am struck by just how much I like these rivers. This one is different from the ones we've been in before; the rocks are huge (person-sized or bigger) and very smooth. 

There aren't enough of them to move freely around the river, which is pretty wide anyway. I start hopping downstream, looking for a path across to the middle, if not the other side. I jump to a smaller rock (maybe half person-sized), land on the side of my foot, feel it slide down to let my weight off it, and SPLASH! into the water, about to my knees. In Ian's pants.

Drat.

I'm a little ahead of the rest of the crew, so without saying a word I walk back to the car, change into a pair of my own shorts, and make my way over to the waterfall. It is, in fact, very pretty. I snap a few pictures and then stare at it for a few minutes. 

A bus pulls onto the one-lane bridge I am standing by, missing my back by half a meter or less. After it pulls away (all the buses stop there for a few seconds for the passengers to take in the view), I decide it's probably time to move. As I walk back toward the part of the river I fell into, the group is heading back to the car. I wished I could have stayed to explore it more, despite my faltering start, but I enjoyed what I got to see.

Feeling a little more lively, though still not chipper, I started looking out the window with a little more interest. Mostly I was hoping to see more water. But it was not to be. What did start appearing were more of those weary mountains. Actually, these mountains were a little bigger than I realized. Quite large, actually. And... wow, they just don't stop, do they? My opinion of the drive is slowly but surely starting to sway in a positive direction when I notice an especially picturesque view framed in my passenger window. There is a tall, gray mountain, capped with a large band of white snow melting quickly enough to drive a moderately powerful waterfall down the craggy sides of the rock. The peak is bordered on either side by greener brothers, below by a long rock slide, and above by a deep blue sky punctuated with wispy white clouds. I snapped the picture – and another one or two, as we drew closer – and was excited to notice we were pulling off the road toward this very mountain (though a little disappointed that this “hidden” view was not going to remain my unique discovery).

There was a trail from where we pulled off leading up toward the mountain. It didn't take us long after reaching the end of the trail to decide to continue further in the direction of the peak, and we made our way down the rocks to a patch of flat ground below us. The area was strewn with some monumentally large boulders. I was tempted to climb one, but the excited pace of the group toward the mountain left me no time to. We paused only a few times to consider turning around – at an unusually loose area of rocks or when our destination seemed particularly far away. But we continued to climb. We reached an area of very packed ice that looked like snow, which was probably quite like what we saw far above us on the peak. We saw two fellow explorers there, on there way down, who teased us for having sandals (I was actually in flip-flops) on this rocky hike. We stopped when we came in sight of the much larger swath of snow/ice at the base of the mountain. We had a spectacular view of the waterfalls fanning out over the shear face of the rock. From this angle we could not see the frozen source of the water, but we were impressed by how much of it there must be to fuel this wonderful display. Turning around, we found our car in the distant carpark to be no wider than a pinky finger held at arms length. We had hiked a moderate distance. Needing to make the cruise ship by 3:00, picked our way back down.

Not sure why I took such a poor picture of the snow. There's a bunch more that way -->

The waterfall up close.

One of the specs under that snow is our car. You can probably only see it in the fullscreen picture.

We were completely surrounded by mountains. 

My complete panorama was eaten by my SD card, so you'll just have to extrapolate the rest from here.

We had pulled off the road within meters of the entrance to the tunnel. Ian had told us there would be a (750 m?) tunnel on our drive today, and we were looking forward to it. When the stop light signaled us to go (most tunnels here, along with most bridges, are one lane) we pulled in and were immediately shrouded in darkness. Or, at least, semi-darkness. The tunnel was very poorly lit. A single overhead bulb was placed every 25 m or so and there were reflectors running either side to allow the passing headlamps (headlights) to do the work of marking the the limits of the tunnel. The walls were untouched rock except for a strip of white on the bottom 50 cm and the odd 15-m-wide strip of metal that would line the walls of a corresponding 15 m length of tunnel. These were so dented they appeared to be made of nothing thicker than a tin can and offer absolutely no structural support. The only thing they seemed to be good for was to make a bizarre circle of flickering red light (out of the retreating taillights (taillamps?) of the cars in front of us) for us to drive through, as if it were either a very cheap form of decoration or the jarringly unnatural course markers for a driving video game. Either way, what grabbed our attention most was the fact that this tunnel was just so steep. We only half-jokingly wondered whether our rental car would be able to make it back up after the cruise.

I was enjoying the strange lighting and the strongly cave-like feel of the tunnel when, suddenly, we reached the end. I say the end was sudden for a few reasons. First, we were (or at least it seemed we were from the back seat) abruptly bombarded with sunlight. Second, we were headed straight into an oncoming bus (a parked bus, waiting its turn to use the tunnel. This effect happens a lot on the one lane bridges as well). Third, our tiny cave opened up into a staggeringly vast valley between staggeringly huge mountains. The scenery was captivating. Every bend in the road revealed another stunning peak. The number and size of them and the way they slid past each other as we drove made me think it was like we were driving through the rolling hills on the north island, except that each one was rocketed up 1000 m in the air. It was delightful to think that the view of these supremely majestic mountains could – and was being – improved! by the simple act of driving through them and watching them gracefully move through each other. I wished I could capture it all on film. But, perhaps metaphorically, my camera's memory card was filled after only two seconds of the video I tried to capture, leaving me with no way to record everything I was taking in other than mentally. I actually, for the first time in my life, wished there were fewer trees so that I could have a more uninterrupted view of the landscape. Every turn that took us into a section of tall, close trees seemed to be a waste of the precious road between us and Milford Sound.

The thing to take in here is the ridiculo-hugeness of everything.

Milford Sound

And, eventually, that road did end, leaving us in the carpark at a 10 minutes' walk from our cruise. We dug through our car and rooted out our bread and tuna cans so we could make a quick lunch before boarding the boat. Since I had been shopping for my rain jacket while the everyone else was buying groceries, including this tuna, I was given my choice of flavors. I picked lemon pepper and was quite pleased with the decision. This was my first time eating tuna and I liked it a lot. We didn't have long to eat, though, so we swiped everything we'd used with a paper towel, I hung Ian's pants out of the car window to dry, and we scurried off to the wharf.

As incredible as the drive here had been, the cruise was even more magnificent. On the top deck of the boat there were no trees to interrupt our view of the splendor of the fjord (despite the name Milford Sound, we were cruising through a fjord). We were floating on top of the familiarly gorgeous blue New Zealand water. On all sides were the green, green slopes and vertical walls of the valley we were moving through. We learned that the tallest peak was over 1300 m above us and the lowest depth was more than 330 m below us. As soon as we were out of the harbor, we saw one of the most spectacular waterfalls I've ever seen. I don't remember hearing an official height, but I would guess it to be somewhere north of 60 m, cascading down in beautiful white jets all weaving all over the mountainside.

The captain spent most of the 100-minute cruise pointing out the especially interesting features of the land we were passing. I missed much of what he said at the beginning because I was holding on to the very front of the deck, wind whipping past my ears, but one of the more incredible things I heard when I sat down was that Milford Sound has occasional tree avalanches. It seems that the trees around here share root systems and that this allows them to cling tenaciously to some seemingly impossible cliff faces. But every now and then, the captain said, a particularly old tree, feeling the strain of hundreds of particularly waterlogged trees below it after a particularly heavy rain, will simply be pulled off the rock. And as it falls, it dislodges other trees below it which dislodge other trees below them and soon a whole swath of trees will find themselves plummeting to the water below. Here the captain points out a triangular section (roughly isosceles, small angle at the top) of bare rock amid an otherwise fairly dense section of trees. This is the scar left from a tree avalanche. Looking around, we begin to see several such scars, and continue to do so through the remainder of the trip.

Fascinating.

travalanche scar

Eventually, a turn in the valley reveals the wide open ocean. Here we learn that Milford Sound is all but invisible to ships at sea. It is so close to impossible to see that its discovery was an accident. A man who had sailed the area for 13 years was caught in a storm and blown into the spectacular hidden fjord. He named it Milford Haven, after his birthplace. As we make a wide U-turn, the captain informs us that the front of the boat will be the best place to be and that we should get out our cameras for the view back into the sound.

 Note the spec of a cruise ship in front of us. We turned around before it did...

"Now for the scenic part of the cruise", I joke to Ian.

...and it caught up and passed us!

 Seals!

And, somehow, it did seem even better coming back. Maybe it was just because the captain said something, or maybe it was the sunlight, or perhaps it was just the lack of wind at the front of the boat. We got an up-close view of Milford's second big waterfall on this return journey. Zach, Wes, and I followed the captain's advice to go down a deck to get a little farther forward on the boat (but still outside). Our reward was being drenched by the spray coming off the 100+ meter waterfall. It was pretty, but it was very wet. Though the three of us stuck it out longer than most of the passengers, we too retreated before the boat did. Back on the top deck, I noticed even the slight breeze that, it turns out, was still blowing. I was cold, but stuck it out for the view as much as the drying effect of the sun.

The cruise continued...

At one point the captain said,

"For a different perspective, put your back against the railing, hold onto your hat, and lean backward"

 

An hour and 35 minutes since our boat left, we were back in sight of that first waterfall. My camera has been limping along on nearly empty batteries for a while now, so it takes several presses of the power button to coax it to come on. I want another picture of this spectacle of water, and now there's a helicopter coming in that I want to catch in the shot as well (for scale, I guess. Plus it's a helicopter). There are helicopter tours of a lot of the sights we've seen, which I imagine must be mind-blowing. This particular chopper is approaching the falls faster than my camera is willing to turn on, so I start to let go of my hope to take a picture of it. As the chopper gets close to the waterfall, it quickly starts rising. Then, shockingly, it twists and plummets straight down, the blades now spinning perpendicular to the ground, giving us on the boat a straight-on view of what is usually the top of the craft. Just above the tree line, it pulls out of the dive and zooms off over our boat to the other side of the fjord. Those passengers certainly got their money's worth. Hopefully there was no vomiting.

I felt done after the cruise. We stopped at a "vertical rapids" and a few potential camping sites before the one we finally chose, but I was aesthetically exhausted. The south island, no, all of New Zealand earned its reputation for beauty here today.

Dinner tonight was sausage from "the sausage capital of New Zealand". Ian and I thought Zach and Wes were snobbish for not liking them as much as we did, but everyone thought it was a good meal. Tomorrow we head for Dunedin.