Milford Sound

I have read the Stephen Fry Compendium of Hyperbole and Superlatives, even the chapter where he explains the art of stringing adjectives together that no one has ever heard of but all mean the same really, and still I cannot explain what we’ve experienced today.

We have come to Te Anau, effectively the gateway to New Zealand’s Fiordland. Our plan was to gauge the weather and see if we could get one of the 80 rain-free days in Milford Sound (which, by the way was neither found by Milford or, in fact, is a Sound but a true, full-blown Fiord of the Scandinavian variety). So we plumped for Monday and weren’t we the lucky ones: almost cloudless sky. Yesterday we watched an amazing film of the area taken from a helicopter and when it ended and the small audience broke into spontaneous applause, the person sitting nearest to me just said “Wow!” and in our conversation that followed they said that they had, that very day, taken a helicopter flight and they rated it the best $**** they had ever spent.

We had planned to do that onto the glacier at Franz Joseph or Fox, further up the coast but the growing consensus was that there may be no better chance than today. This same couple had waited three days in Franz Joseph and the weather had stopped them flying.

So, we decided we’d bring forward our heli-flight and do it today.

A coach picked us up from our site and we drove to Milford Sound, stopping on the way for photo-opportunities: the scenery was breath-taking (here I go, but I might have started too high!). There was a little disappointment that the much-hailed Mirror Lakes had cloud above them when we stopped and they didn’t work as well as lakes we know in Ireland. But after about three hours driving, stopping at stunning scenic points, driving some more, being entertained by Bruce our driver with amazing information and some jokes which will be right up Simon and Peter’s street, we arrived at Milford and boarded our boat. No sooner had we stepped foot than we were served a mighty lunch and off we went.

This, then, is a Fiord with steep forested mountain plunging from a mile up to a mile below the water on either side. No words or pictures can describe how beautiful it is. Usually Heath and I are chatting away and pointing things out to each other but we were strangely quiet because our chins were resting, for the most part, on the deck!

We gently cruised up one side and down the other, pausing to look at fur seal, water cascading from above with the bow of the boat just a couple of metres from where it crashed into the water, soaking those outside on the lower deck and spraying those of us on the top.

We took about 45 minutes off the boat to go 8 metres under water

in an observation chamber, dodging some leaping dolphins as we docked alongside, before completing the round trip.

We were collected at the dock, back on the bus for a short drive to where just four of us alighted to board the helicopter. We didn’t have time to think “What the …. are we doing?” Just time enough to hand over whatever was left in my wallet, climb in to a tiny five-seater chopper and take off. For the outward flight Heather sat between me and the pilot in the front and the ground fell away beneath us. We flew inches (well it felt like it) from the mountainsides, up and up and up, hovering while the pilot told us where we were: I already knew – a bloody long way up and a dead drop back down if things went wrong!.

Up some more until we were seemingly on top of the world, the mountains of Fiordland surrounding us. We landed on the glacier almost at the top of New Zealand’s second highest mountain, Tutoku. We climbed out and onto the ice, heeding the warnings to go neither near the back of the helicopter or the crevasses.

It really did defy words. We had had no time to think about it and here we were, a chopper flight to a glacier where the view was stunningly, wonderfully, beautifully – oh come on Fry, help me out – amazing.

Several people had told us we should do it, that it is an amazing experience, but I’m sorry, try as I might, I cannot explain just how brilliant it was.

Heather had a few instructions from the pilot

but didn’t take the controls on the way back!

When we rejoined the coach half an hour’s worth of drive up the road towards ‘home’ we were greeted with the nicest expressions of envy from some of our fellow day-trippers and a seemingly genuine pleasure on our driver’s part that we had enjoyed the flight.

Both of us feel it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. The day has left us tired and suffering a bit of sensory overload: how good a feeling is that?! If the holiday ended today I wouldn’t care: we’ve just been to a place we could only have dreamt of going to and, in fact, few people could ever get to until the invention of the helicopter. We did it on an exceptional and perfect day and we will never forget it.