The Drive to Milford Sound

Here's another great pleasure you'll find throughout New Zealand: you spontaneously find amazing things to see on the way to the amazing things you plan to see.

Today's drive to Milford Sound, where we planned to board a cruise boat that would take us throughout the Milford Fiord, was just such an example.

The signs and brochures say "allow two hours to drive from Te Anau to Milford Sound." The distance between these two places, only 120km (roughly 75 miles), was so short that we assumed it was a warning we could ignore.

We figured the warning was for all the wimpy, slow tourist drivers who hadn't acclimated as well as we had--now that we had a staggering seven days of left-side-of-the-road driving under our belts.

It turned out that three hours was a more appropriate time to allow for this drive, because we were compelled to stop several times to enjoy amazing views, cliffs, falls, rivers and mountains.


There is so much natural beauty everywhere here that even after a week we're finding ourselves starting to take it for granted!