The Milford Sound Adventure

Thursday 8 July 2010


I woke up this morning and felt absolutely miserable. I had a pounding headache and a massive sore throat. I felt nauseous as well. We had to be in the town centre at 6:50, so sleeping in was not an option.


We caught our bus and gave him our luggage. This was a tour bus that would take us from Queenstown, to Te Anau, to Milford Sound (which would include a 90 minute Milford Sound cruise), back to Queenstown with the option to drop us off at Te Anau (which was the option we took). During the bus ride, I tried closing my eyes and resting my head every once in a while to settle my stomach. The roads were really twisty. So twisty, in fact, that several people mentioned the roads would close sometimes when it snowed. It is a very dangerous road.


The tour guide gave a lot of commentary on the mammals in New Zealand. There were a lot of deer farms around. The deer were brought to New Zealand for recreation, hunting. The deer adapted quickly to their atmosphere, and the people did not hunt them as much as expected. The deer did massive devastation to the vegetation, so they wanted to do something about it. So New Zealand actually hired professional hunters and captured them. They also got helicopters to lower people on the backs of the deer. Ropes were tied around their feet, and they were helicoptered away. So that is why there are a lot of deer farms. Actually, the population of sheep has dropped dramatically. You can see just as many cows or even deer as sheep. The milk industry has increased. Lamb is actually very expensive, so people here do not eat as much lamb.


There are only two native mammals on New Zealand, and they are both small species of bat. Everything else was brought. Rats were brought by the Europeans. The rats are doing major devastation to the native bird species. The stoats were stealing eggs from birds (especially the Kiwi bird). They have stoat traps everywhere and the trees are marked with pink triangles to indicate where the stoat traps are.


Also, the Moa bird (a huge bird that used to roam New Zealand that kind of resembles an ostrich), are extinct, because the Maori would hunt them by setting forests on fire. They would eat the meat that was cooked by the fire, but they destroyed the bird and their habitat. New Zealand has lost 44 of its native bird species.


New Zealand is formed by glaciers and tectonic plates. It faces 14,000 earthquakes a year, but only 200 are felt.


Okay, sorry for all my commentary. So, we got to our first stop and had 1/2 hour of time to get out and enjoy Te Anau. I had the chills and was freezing. My toes felt like rocks and hurt so bad from the cold. I could barely walk, but we needed to go to the store for fruit, so I hobbled around like an old lady with two club feet. We of course couldn't find the store that was two minutes away and impossible to miss in a minuscule town, so we asked a couple and they pointed us in the right direction. We made it and got food. Then I hobbled several feet behind Mom and went to a souvenir shop to warm up. As soon as we got in, we had to leave, because the bus was about to leave. So the five minute trip took about 30 minutes due to my severe handicap.


Then we headed out to Milford Sound. along the way, the driver made several stops so we could get out and take photos. We drove and took pictures of mountains, valleys, rivers...The ground was completely frozen. There are 71 species of plants found no where else in the world but in this area. Not that we saw them all or anything.


We stopped to see the Kea bird, which is the only true southern Alpine Parrot. Then we did a Chasm walk. Then we finally got to Milford Sound. We boarded the boat and I was trying to listen to the commentary, but was declining fast. Throughout this whole time, I was trying to hide how I was feeling so that Mom would not be worried about me. I wanted her to be able to enjoy her trip, but she knows me well and had her suspicions. Although, when I decided to drink tea, she knew there was something majorly wrong. For those of you who do not know, I HATE tea. It is a vile vile drink and I stay away from it as much as I can. Well, my throat felt like it was caving in, so I tried to sooth it with tea. Every time I took a gulp (no sipping for me, I tried to get rid of it as fast as I could), I apparently made a horrible face. Mom told me I looked quite hilarious. I choked it down, and went outside a couple of times, but toward the end, I couldn't do it anymore. I was shivering so bad.


After the sound (which was amazingly beautiful by the way), our guide dropped us off in Te Anau. We walked to the hostel. At this point (if I didn't know before) I knew I had a fever. We went out once more to get some soup. The only thing I had to eat today was some bread we got at the store. I managed to drink some of the soup, then set a record for going to bed...6:40.