Milford Part 1!

Hello!!

Well another busy few days, so thought i better write it all down before i forget!

So, its Thursday afternoon and we are now on the east coast of the south island in a town (although the kiwis call it a city!!) called Dunedin. It is meant to be the Edinburgh of NZ, although we havent got very far in exploring yet. We have just checked in and dived into the internet cafe next door, well it has been a few days now!! The hostel is lush! Its really small (only 40 beds) and is like a self contained flat. Newly decorated with all the mod cons, its really nice! not that anywhere we have stayed has been bad - most places are of a very high standard, the YHAs are always good, but its nice to get a change, otherwise you feel that you are staying in the same place with the same kind of people all the time.

We had a good couple of days earlier in the week enjoying Wanaka and Queenstown. It has to be my favourite area of NZ. Its beautiful and with the southern alps all round it really is spectacular whatever the weather!! On Monday, it was a bank holiday and the sun actually shone!! One place said it was 27 degrees!! it was lovely and really looking forward to summer now!! We visited a small gold mining settlement called Arrowtown just north of Queenstown. Quite a lot of river scenes from LOTR were filmed here, so we went for a walk along Arrow River and also explored the Chinese Settlement - as once gold was discovered in the Otago region a lot of Chinese men came over to mine.

We then left Queenstown and made our way to Milford Sound. It has been an amazing couple of days, really in the middle of nowhere - although the Fiordland (the region there) is situated on the south west coast and is mainly just dense rainforest. The nearest village is Te Anu, which is 120km south of Milford. We were in Te Anu last night just breaking up the journey from Milford to here really.

There are no petrol stations, no shops, nothing in this 120 km. We were the adventurous type and stayed over in the only accomodation in the area! It was good, although the most expensive we have paid yet. Most people visit the sound on a day trip from Queenstown, but its a 13hr all round trip and we decided we wanted to have fun and enjoy the experience, and im so pleased we stayed for the night! We didnt really explore the sounding area as it rained pretty much for the whole 24 hours we were there! They got 7 meters (!!!!) of rain a year in this region, which is the second highest in the world! And i think we must have seen a least 1/2 meter!! When the rain is at its peak, one of the many surrouding mountains can have 80 waterfalls cascading down at any one time!! Truly an amazing sight to see.

You can tell how remote Milford is, because not even the maori settled here. They did not like it because of the rain and also the vast quantities of sandflys. Even cook bypassed Milford Sound and he really got everywhere!! It was actually a welshman that was the first european to settle here and he named it after Milford in Wales, so there you go Julie!!

It was an amazing experience to cruise around Milford and im running out of internet time, so instead of rushing and forgetting something will finish this chapter off in the next couple of days. We are in Dunedin until Saturday and then spending Saturday night in Oamaru and then Christchurch and thats NZ done for us. So will finish off then.

Hope it hasnt snowed too much with you guys!! Although we got our fair share of it yesterday too!!!

E xxx