Still playing catch up here. I had hoped to finish the Down under posts before the trip we are now on. However, this cruise has quite a few sea days so I am still trying! Anyway, here we go…
After Bluff we travelled back through Invercargill and on towards Te Anau, a big lake on the edge of the Fiordland National Park which takes up the southern section of the west coast of the South Island – got it?! Anyway, it was a very wet and windy day so not the most enjoyable of drives, but, as ever, very scenic and we got to see some of the sheep for which New Zealand is famous.
We stopped for lunch at the restaurant of “Famous Tuatapere Sausages”. B could never resist such an invitation! They were nice, but not the best we have ever had, and the portions were huge so we kept one sausage each for later.
We arrived at the lakeside campsite in time to get the last pitch which had a lake view from it, and the next day it was the excursion to the fjord of Milford Sound. Happily we didn’t have to drive ourselves to this one as it was a coach ride connecting with a boat ride.
The route to the boat was scenic, as we had come to expect here, and also dramatic at times, with a very basic tunnel which the coaches coming each way just fitted into.
A couple of photos from a stop off at the aptly named Mirror Lake above, plus more views on the way below. Hard not to keep taking photos!
During the cruise in Milford Sound we learned that it is mis-named as a sound is created by a river and a fjord by a glacier, so it should be called Milford Fjord. What’s in a name? In theory quite a lot.
The pictures say it all really – it was a great boat trip and we were lucky the weather had improved a lot from the previous days.
