After a really good night sleep last night we got up, got dressed, packed our things and were on the road by about 6:15AM. We had a bit of a hard time getting the van out of the car park, but after about a 9 point turn we were on our way!
The road towards Milford Sound is so nice! It’s a good thing I wasn’t driving or we may have stopped way too often to take photos. It was basically lakes and clouds over mountains again but they were amazing to look at in the low morning light. It was a little hard to take photos from the car, but we ended up stopping at a few places along the way. The weather was crisp but dry and still with a little bit of color in the sky from the sun rise so we ended up stopping at a rest area and I took the drone out for a spin.
Most of the day was basically driving, stopping for photos, videos or food. A picture speaks a thousand words so instead of describing everything, I’ll just post the photos and videos!
We stopped for some breakfast and supplies at Te Anau, which is the last place to get petrol before the long road to Milford Sound - you don’t want to run out on that road! Anth and Amy went in search of a mini-usb cable and a car mount so we could charge the GoPro in the car and record a timelapse of the road trip.
After leaving Te Anau it was an other couple of hours and we reach the tunnel! When you look at the route from Queenstown to Milford Sound, it looks like it goes the long way around but it has to because of the mountains. Well even though we drove around so many mountains to get there, there is still one where you can’t get around so there is a (roughly) 1 kilometer tunnel drilled through the mountain! It’s pretty impressive!
When we finally arrived, there were people everywhere and we timed it perfectly to get signed in and go straight on to the boat. The first thing we did was break out our picnic so we could spend the rest of the time taking in the sights! We made a couple of rolls which we think was a good choice, even though they sold food on board. We looked very European with our salami, cheese and bread sprawled out along our table!
The weather was absolutely perfect, we got really lucky! The boat went around the sound and up to the entrance to the Tasman Sea and back again. Along the way we actually saw dolphins, which apparently it pretty rare around this time of year. We also saw some seals and some interesting bird life. On our boat trip we went passed two waterfalls, the last of which the boat driver moved until the point where the front of the boat was under to waterfall and the people on the nose of the boat got saturated!
It was a really nice ride and it wasn’t overly crowded, we still managed to get to the front of the boat for most of the ride (but we skipped the getting wet part) and the top of the boat was pretty spacious too and had a great view.
When we got back to land, there wasn’t too much else to do so we just went back to the car and started the journey back. We made sure to keep switching drivers to share the load, so I took this leg of the trip. Along the way there was a pretty big open area with a little river that ran along a break out area so we stopped to have a walk around and I got to try out the drone again. Interestingly at the luge area yesterday and at Milford Sound there were signs saying “no drones”, but out here was fine.
I ended up trying out the sports mode too, this drone is quick! It didn’t take long before I couldn’t see it in the sky anymore, but the view from the streaming video was great!
We stopped at a few other places along the way that were marked by the brown tourist attraction signs. One of those places was called The Chasm and it was an amazing rock formation carved out by a waterfall, it was really cool!
We finally made it to Te Anau again, stopped for a coffee, switched drivers and continued home. Along the way, there was a cop hiding on the side of the road and he caught us going over the limit so unfortunately we have a new souvenir, a New Zealand speeding fine!
When we got back we tried to find a place to eat. After checking out a few places, we decided to go the second Japanese place we saw and it was really good! We got a bunch of smaller dishes to share and it was some of the best Japanese we’ve had! We even had some sake with our meals and finished it off with some sake bombs!
While we were eating, Amy got a message from her mum letting us know that the chance of seeing the Aurora Australis is very high from Queenstown tonight, so we went home, got our gear and jumped in the car in search of high ground!
We saw photos of the Aurora from a place called Moke Lake which was only 20 minutes so we went there. It was mostly windy, unsealed, gravel roads and it was pretty dark but Rob did a pretty good job of driving our Jucy van through those roads. When we got there, there were some really bright lights and some pretty big teepees. We couldn’t quite tell what they were doing, it didn’t look like your typical camp site and then we saw a van parked near us that was for a movie production studio so it could have been a movie set. There were even bright colored lights powered by generators shining on the water.
We tried to take photos of the lake but it wasn’t turning out so well. There was so much cloud cover that we couldn’t see a thing, plus the light from the camp / movie site was providing a little too much light pollution anyway. It looked like at that very moment, their nearby generator stopped working and one the lights stopped working, which would have made us look pretty suspicious. They started driving around and we decided it would be best to leave so we headed home. It was about midnight at this point, another late night so we went straight to bed.