Despite Milford Sound being reportedly one of the most picturesque places on the planet, and the top of every list of 'things to do in NZ', everything that we read about it indicated that it wasn't the place for us. After all, how can anywhere live up to hype like that, or still be beautiful with the inevitable hordes swarming around it?
This was the main reason for our choice of Doubtful Sound over Milford, and as you'll have read in our earlier post, we had a truly amazing trip onto Doubtful.
But, we found ourselves with a whole day to travel to Queenstown (2 hours from Te Anau), and we thought that we should see what it was like, or we would have always wondered if we had missed a true gem.
So we hit the road at 8, in order to beat the tourist busses, and set off for the 2 hour drive to Milford.
Upon arrival, we approached the stunning vista with some trepidation, and as it was revealed, our thought was "Oh, is that it?"
To be fair to the place, the weather was pretty poor, the cloud-base was low and the tide was out. We took the photo (see below), had a cup of tea in the cafe, ate an expensive, though tasty, cake and promptly left.
On the way back, we stopped at the impressive "Chasm" force, which had some pretty rock formations apparently caused by pebbles getting caught in eddies in the river and carving large bowls. Even though there's been no rain for several days, the force was still strong in this one!
There was a cool effect, where there was some kind of standing wave set up perpendicular to the flow direction, and upstream of the force. See the photo below. In it, the water is going from bottom to top. Any explations anyone?
After leaving the force, we went through the Homer tunnel (built as a depression-era work project) which was built to connect Milford Sound with the rest of New Zealand. A side effect of this steep, dark, single-direction bottleneck, made for the best part of the day... Flying back to Te Anau on amazing roads, with no traffic, in a 2.5l Suburu, with a Mostly Autumn soundtrack.
Apparently, the journey takes 2.5 hours minimum... Hah!
How kind of Milford Sound to confirm your prejudices. Always heartwarming when that happens.
ReplyDeleteAs for the stringy water - how peculiar, but then isn't it interesting what you can do with a thin trickle of water out of a tap - for example, make it break into droplets upstream of a finger placed under it. I think the great Professor Brainstawm wrote to his water company to complain that the water was coming out twisted; they replied to say that was fine, but please get in touch again if it started coming out in knots.
Dashed strange things, standing waves. Who'd have thought that no-one understood the harmonics of a drum til Mr Bessel came up with his functions.
I can add that anyone who tells you they understand how rivers work is fibbing massively. A case in point: depending on what method you use, estimates of a river's sediment flux can vary by two orders of magnitude. As for modelling river flow, the best models can manage a few seconds before giving up and crashing. And they still treat every particle as a sphere. Top-down models don't help much, either.
ReplyDeletePretty rock formations, though!