Travelholic: Land of Fiords

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Land of Fiords

Day 5 (30 Sept’09). Journey to Milford Sound.

We’re more prepared this time around (smarter too), first of all; we woke up early plus all our stuff are all ready and packed, checked out, put our luggage at Deco Backpackers storage room and walked to the Steamer Wharf, 20 mins before departure as per indicated. Felt very proud of ourselves *pet on the back* *proud smile*.

Gavin, our driver cum tour guide finally arrived, nice friendly chap and informative as well, registered and off we head to Milford Sound. We expected our journey to be a direct route to Milford Sound, but to our surprise, he made a few stops at scenic and historic places - value for money! *happy*. Highly recommend you guys to use them - Real Journey.

1st stop was at Kingston to see an vintage steam engine choo choo train - Kinston Flyer. This little town is very unique, why? The cost of the land fetch up between NZ$150k - 300k (phew), overlooking the Lake Wakatipu, it’s a place for holiday homes or bachelor crib some people might refer it. The home are really tiny and yet the price…. Wow!

2nd stop - Mirror Lake, hemmm…. Not much of a mirror nor lake, since the lake we have been “exposed” to were like forever big and forever long… Andrea was disappointed here (we have higher expectation).

Next stop Gunn’s Hollyford Camp, home to Murray Gunn (understood he is an eccentric). It’s a place where people would rent a cabin and do a little fishing, nature walk and etc.

Falls Creek - awesome. Finally we stopped at a creek and to complete it - there’s a waterfall as well - PERFECT.

He stopped at a creek overlooking the mountains, we saw a Kea bird - nosy and noisy, apparently Kea have the intellect of a 7 yrs old kid. He was waiting for us with a pose… am half thinking he might ask us for money or perhaps Real Journey engage him to be there on standby for tourist ie under their payroll. Hahhahaa…..

This is the more interesting part (my ignorant I must admit), what they do is; if they see there would be an avalanche of some sort which is dangerous to the traffic, they will blow the area and “create” or trigger the avalanche (they’re professionally trained and I believe this is under the road ministry or something). And this year is the longest period (12 days) they closed the stretch. Gavin stopped at the designated site to show us how thick the snow is (or whatever left out of it). This was before we reach the Homer Tunnel, the smallest tunnel I ever experience and it is NOT SHORT! SCARY!). How small? If 2 busses pass, there are probably one inch gap from each other. Even a car and a van we need to slow down.

Avalanche - associated with snow, but I never heard of tree avalanche till today. It happens due to the strong wind blow from the avalanche that causes the tree to fall on top of each other… interesting? Definitely. Pic on the left is what happen last week and the one on the right, happened more then 10 years ago… it took that long to grow that little. Imagine….

Finally we have reached Milford Sound jetty. Excited! Excited! Excited! So excited that I think I’ve taken 700 pics on the cruise ALONE. Giler ke apa ni…ehhehe… I mean, even the pics I took can’t do it justice. MUST MUST MUST GO! To make it special (ceh wah…), they anchored and gave us 3 choices, swim (6 degree C - HELL NO!), kayaking (tiring thy arm) and boating (ahh… better choice). We took the later ofcos aside that we can take more pics!!!!!! And guess what! We saw penguins! Only 3 Happy Feet though - jadi lar.