Te Anau – Milford sound – The Catlins

Arrived in Te Anau, after a long but very nice drive from Queenstown. We had blue skies until half an hour before arrival.
But that didn’t killed the mood, because we were prepared for that. The fiordlands are amongst the wettest places on earth. With 255 raindays a year and rainfall of around 6000mm a year.

So first day we didn’t see much of the nice lake around Te Anau. We did make a visit to the glowworm caves as a rainactivity. Unfortunately we don’t have pict of that, as it wasn’t allowed. Think of it as a dark wet cave, with thousands of small green lights around you, pretty cool, especially if you know these glowworms can only be seen in a couple of places worldwide.

The next day was D-Day for Milford Sound. A 2 hour drive followed by a 3 hour boat cruise should gave us an idea of the beauty of this fjord.
The first of the roadtrip, was as expected, low clouds and no view on mountains whatsoever.
But once we got higher up the road, the weather turned and we got some blue sky and clear views.

Once we were on the cruise, we had misty conditions again, but even then this is really an amazing place. The low clouds really gave an extra edge.

The Milford Sound is a fjord surrounded by mountains that rise from the sea to up to 1600m, I can only try to explain, and even the pictures don’t do it justice, but we were convinced it is one of the prettiest sceneries we have ever seen…and we have seen some

We are now in the most Southern part of New Zealands South Island : the catlins

This is a coastal area with lots of wildlife.
On day one we could put a check to some of the animals on our wishlist :

Sealions, relaxing and sunbading on the beach

Pinguïns : endangered yellow eyed pinguïn, comming ashore at night

Dolphins : Rare Hector dolphins, spotted near the coastline during sunset (kind of hard to photograph)

And some other fun things :

Trees, that had a bad hairday because of the wind

And pita everywhere…