December 31, 2013 - New Year's Eve!!!
We had a GREAT day planned for the last day of 2013 and it even started with the sun! We had some driving to do, so we got on the road fairly early to enjoy 5 hours of road trip to get to Milford Sound.
Here is a little about Milford Sound:
In geography a sound or seaway is a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord; or it may be defined as a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land
Despite being one of the most accessible fiords, Milford Sound remains quiet and still, bounded by steep cliffs and dense rainforest. Rain or shine, Milford Sound continues to captivate even the most experienced traveller. At the pinnacle of Milford Sound is the magnetising Mitre Peak - standing a proud 1,692 metres above sea level, it is certainly an impressive sight to behold. Milford Sound is by far the best known of all of the fiords in New Zealand, and the only one that can be accessed by road. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eight wonder of the world.
As you can tell, we had a lot to look forward to.
To start off, we drove almost all the way around Lake Wakatipu (you can see pictures of this lake on Day 4 - Queenstown). We also were near a few Lord of the Rings film sights. We hadn't planned detours to all of them so we really only stopped at the edge of the area where Fangorn Forest was filmed (found in The Two Towers). I guess we'll need another trip to see the other spots.
We also stopped at Lake Te Anau on the drive, which is the largest lake on the south island and second largest in all of New Zealand. The lake was huge, as you can see, but we also thought the shores looked a lot like where the fellowship stops on the Anduin river right before Frodo and Sam break off from the rest of the group.
As we entered Fiordland National Park, which is where Milford Sound is located, the clouds really settled in and we began to see some raindrops. Luckily before this happened we stopped at Mirror Lakes and got some more great pics.
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| The park has placed a sign at the foot of the lake backwards so that when you see it's reflection it reads correctly. Pretty cool! |
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| View of the peaks above Mirror Lakes |
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| There was a little wind today, but the reflection in the water is almost perfect... |
Once it started raining, we were able to take picture of the waterfalls that flow more abundantly when it is raining. It was so amazing!
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| This picture shows the U-shaped canyon. This is what happens when a glacier cuts through a mountain rather than a river |
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| We thought this girl was blatantly ignoring the "Do not feed the Kea" signs, but she was actually just taking a close up picture haha! |
This takes us to our arrival at Milford Sound. Since this is already a pretty long post I'm splitting today into two separate pieces. Otherwise I will never get anything finished! It's surprising how many places don't have good internet options so that I can work on my posts during the trip. Hopefully I won't get too much farther behind!
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