Easter Break: WU Does Fjordland

The WU Crew: in the back- Jessica, Leslie, Stas, Megan and Shaffer.

in the front- Victoria, Pete and I.

We rose before the sun on Monday morning to make the two-hour drive to Milford Sound for a morning cruise of the fjord. We drove from Te Anau along the Milford Road into Fjordland National Park. The sun appeared about halfway through our drive, by its light we could see the mountains, waterfalls, and lakes that we had been blindly driving past. The mountains grew taller and crept nearer as we drove west; soon their steep faces filled the van's windows and even by craning our necks upward we couldn't see their peaks. Upon reaching the fjord we boarded the small tour boat and took places in the bow with a perfect view of our entrance to Milford Sound.

Milford Sound

Tall mountains stood proudly out of the calm water of the fjord. Waterfalls adorned their tree-covered slopes like necklaces of trickling water. Some of the falls were set in deep crevasses that they had cut into the rocky face with centuries of work. One of the mountains was the steepest single rock face in the world, rising straight up from the base of the fjord. On another mountainside you could see five huge curves taken out of its face from each of the glacial movements through the fjord. We spent the entire cruise standing in the front of the boat joking around and taking in the magnificent view.

Five glacial cuts

Driving back to the east from Milford Sound we stopped at an really geologically-interesting canyon called the Chasm. Huge rocks were naturally organized along its walls and large logs jutted out from random spots where they had gotten stuck over the years. The pictures just don't do its depth and intriguing rocks justice. During our scenic drive back to Te Anau there were few cars, but we did get stuck once when a herd of sheep decided to use the road as their own personal highway.

In the afternoon we recovered from our early morning and then took a short tramp to the beginning of the Kepler track around the edge of Lake Te Anau. (The Kepler track is one of the Great Walks, a 60 km tramp through the mountains of Fjordland.)