Cruising Milford Sound

If you took a sample of New Zealand tourists (can you tell I was a Sociology major?) and asked them which island you should visit, most of them would say the South Island. Now if you asked them what the number one must-see is on the South Island, most would say Milford Sound. I had been looking forward to Milford Sound for awhile now and had already planned to book a day cruise there. Luckily, before we left, I discovered this great website (www.bookme.co.nz) where we were able to get a 70% off discount!

So after leaving Wanaka, we continued south, through Queenstown (with plans to return and explore at a later date) and headed straight for Milford Sound to catch our cruise (a 5+ hour drive which we completed in two days).

Milford Sound is located within New Zealand's largest national park (Fiordland) in the southwestern part of the South Island. There's tons to see in the area, but since we were short on time, we decided to explore more thoroughly on the way back.

On the morning of the cruise, we drove the last leg of the journey and already got a taste of the beauty we were about to experience:

Mountains on the drive over

Milford Sound as viewed from the car park

The cruise we signed up for was a small to mid-sized ship with several viewing decks, designed to fit a few hundred people. However, there were only about 20-30 people on the cruise that day, so we got to enjoy it in an uncrowded and relaxing way.

Once everybody was on board, we were off!

Though the day started off cold and foggy, the skies soon cleared, the sun came out and we were able to enjoy great views of majestic mountains and thundering waterfalls.

Here are just a few of the many pictures we took there:

At one point, we got to get up close and personal with Stirling Falls:

Unfortunately we didn't see any dolphins or penguins, but we did see heaps of fur seals:

The cruise lasted about two hours, but went by in a flash. We had a lovely time!