Milford Sound – Welcome to New Zealand

Our first “excursion” in New Zealand is one where we didn’t even have to leave the ship.  We cruised Fiordland National Park, in New Zealand.  And, the first section that we visited was Milford Sound.

Rudyard Kipling, the great writer & poet, referred to the Milford Sound as the 8^th Wonder of the World.  We were lucky on this early morning (6:15 am – 8:15 am), as the weather cooperated with us.  We’d heard from staff and other cruisers that there have been times when it rained or the winds were too high, and the seas just a bit too wavy, to enter the sound.  It was rather dark when we entered the sound, but the daylight soon revealed one of many waterfalls that we would see today.  

One of the things that almost overwhelms you is the size of the fiord.  The walls just keep reaching up and up, so that something that seems rather normal sized (like the previous waterfall) is actually very large, seem almost dwarfed by the fiord walls.  If you look at the lower right corner of this image, you can just barely see a 3-mast boat in the water.  If that’s how small a decent sized boat looks, we are less than specks on a camera lens!

I did manage to zoom in on the half-moon that was in the skies (and very tiny in the previous image – on the left).  The moon and the snow-capped mountains that make up the fiords helped to create the crisp, cold air the filled our lungs.

The skies look rather grey in this shot, but I think it was just the angle from which I shot this image.  Again, there’s a decent sized boat in the lower right portion of this image – looks really tiny – like a Matchbox boat, except, of course, they never made those!

Here’s a close up of just one of the hundreds of waterfalls we saw today.  I will do my best to limit the number of waterfall images I show you, and only share the very best, or we could be looking at waterfall images for weeks!

After a couple of hours we exited Milford Sound, but we still had a lot of Fiordland National Park to see.  Part II of this wonderful treasure is coming up!

Enjoy!