Milford Sound day trip
Milford Sound is one of those "must do" sights of New Zealand, featuring prominently in every tourist advertisement about the country. So here it is. I liked it, but I guess since I'd seen so many pictures and it had been so hyped up, and also because the day trip involves 10 hours on the road round trip, the 2 hour cruise seemed a bit anticlimactic.
The highlight of the day for me was seeing the wildlife in the fjord (Milford is technically a fjord, not a sound). We saw seals, which I wasn't too excited about at first ("we have plenty in La Jolla!"), but these were cute and furry, not fat and stinky. We also had dolphins come out to the boat to play with us. Two of them really liked swimming right under the bow of the ship. Wherever we went, they followed. The faster we went, the faster they went. I thought we would run them over, but they kept swimming and jumping and blowing water out of their blowholes! We could even hear the two squeaking at each other.
The 10 hour bus trip to/from Milford Sound was also pretty neat. I felt like we could see the New Zealand of my imagination. I had first come across images of New Zealand when I worked for Qantas, and our ad agency M&C Saatchi also created the famous and successful "100% Pure New Zealand" campaign. The lush and green images didn't appeal to me then, but for some reason I really seek them out now. I think it's amazing that there's all of this rainforest, with snow and glaciers side by side (or on top of each other). Here's one of our stops, at "The Chasm."
Pictures of rainforest and waterfalls also abound in the Air New Zealand Koru Clubs, which I think also whet my appetite for this sort of scenery!
On the way back, we watched "The World's Fastest Indian" which cast Anthony Hopkins as a New Zealander from Invercargill. I'm sure it had been an inflight movie option a couple years ago that didn't strike my interest then; but it's a nice movie and you really get into a "New Zealand" mood watching the film.
