By far the best known of the four sounds in Fiordland National Park is Milford Sound. As a result it’s also the most accessible and cheapest, so we hopped on the uber tourist trail and made our way there. The drive in was a snaking hundred kilometers through the mountains, taking us just over two hours and ending up being the best part of the day. Rainforests, waterfalls, mountains, lakes, Fiordland is like a Disney version of wilderness. It was also sunny as we drove in – Fiordland is the wettest place in NZ, each year receiving tens of meters of rain and experiencing maybe 15 sunny days.

It wasn’t sunny for long. The route in winds up mountain after mountain and our ascent brought us into the clouds where it inevitably was raining. Further ascent brought us to snow, a shock to everyone – the first snow around here typically falls a month later. Many drivers pulled over to put on chains and plows were out in full force to deal with the inch that was barely sticking to the road, so everyone was safe – what a relief The final leg of the drive goes through a tunnel several kilometers long that is burrowed right through the heart of a mountain. The Homer Tunnel must have cost many millions to build, and goes nowhere except Milford Sound. The population of locals there is under 200. THAT’S how heavily touristed the place is. There was no snow at the other end, but lots of rain.

The only way to see Milford Sound in less than a week (there’s a 7 day hiking track) is to go by chopper or boat. Not having hundreds of dollars to blow, we chose boat. The trip was quite disappointing – it poured the whole time, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the intense winds, visibility was horrible, and compared to the rest of NZ, it wasn’t especially nice – beautiful for sure, but so’s the rest of the country. The best bit came when we pulled alongside an enormous slab of rock (enormous in this case means a full 1000 meters of solid rock, 800 straight up and another 200 under the water). Before the last ice age this rock had filled the fiord, and you could see more of it on the other side of the sound. NZ was covered in ice for many tens of thousands of years though, and a glacier bore its way the 1000 meters through the chunk of limestone. Huge scrape marks are still visible on the vertical face. I spent a while trying to understand the scale of what I was witnessing, but I still haven’t really come to grips with it.

Hilarious news greeted us when the boat returned to the wharf. The road on the other side of the tunnel had been shut down until the snow stopped and was plowed. It ended up only delaying us for a couple hours, though we both thought we could feel our braincells dying as we crawled through the tunnel on the way back – it took maybe an hour, and the smell of fumes was overwhelming.

We pulled off for a little walk at Gunn Lake near the entrance to Fiordland, and I really enjoyed this. Everything in the forest here was covered with moss. I found my inner child for a bit as I bounced on the incredibly thick and springy mats, but then lost my shoe as I punched through into quite the muddy quagmire below. I guess wet feet should be expected in Fiordland.

Finding a place to camp that night was actually really difficult. We drove for hours as kilometer after kilometer of narrow-shouldered highway rolled past, until we finally found a neatly manicured park on the outskirt of some small town. I hid the van in a grove of trees, and we woke up ticketless. Woo!