Fiordland South Island in New Zealand Holiday Guide.

Our Fiordland Travel Guide with lots of pictures about our New Zealand Holiday where we went on a cruise to both Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound plus a trip under the mountain to see Manapouri Power Station.

We were staying at Te Anau which is ideal for getting to both Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound - however apart from doing these excellent trips there are quite a few other things to do in the area. For a start the car ride from Te Anau down to Milford Sound is pretty well a day out in itself irrespective of the actual trip out into the fiords. There are several short walks you can do including Lake Mistletoe, a really enjoyable wander around the red beech woods and streams at Lake Gunn, Mirror Lakes plus loads of streams and waterfalls to see. Then the experience of going through the Homer Tunnel and the subsequent breathtaking scenery you get as you continue on down via The Chasm into Milford Sound itself.
The scenery - and if you are lucky all sorts of wildlife such as seals, dolphins and penguins - to be seen whilst on both Sounds cruises is brilliant. Given that both cruises realistically occupy a whole day we consider that if we could only do one of them we would opt for Milford Sound because of the tremendous forest and mountain scenery on the journey down as well as that on the cruise itself which was equally as good as Doubtful Sound.

Te Anau. Ideally situated for visiting both Milford and Doubtful Sounds Te Anau is a really nice town to stay in for a few days. Apart from loads of motels and other types of accommodation the town has quite a few restaurants and bars, supermarkets, clothes shops and also several petrol stations. Lake Te Anau is the second largest lake in New Zealand and the largest lake in South Island and the town has really nice walkways and paths bordering the lake - with great views of the deep forest on the far shore and beyond that Mount Luxmore and the Murchison Mountain Range. A variety of trips can be taken from Te Anau - from helicopter rides to the mountains and over Fiordland National Park, to visiting the Glow Worm Caves to fast boat trips (jet boating) on both the Waiau and Wairarahiri Rivers - or of course more scenic and sedate trips out into the lake for fishing or sightseeing.
Walking or Tramping tracks such as the 53.5km long Milford Track, the Routeburn Track and the Kepler Track can easily be organised from Te Anau as well - i.e. getting you to the start and pick up at the finish can be sorted out. It should be noted (to our despair) that these long distance tracks are 3 or 4 or more days walks involving staying overnight in huts etc. There were no possibilities to make some nice 15 or 20km circular walks out of them - in our case with only a few days in Te Anau available - all we could do was go to each end of the Kepler Track and do a 15km or so "there and back" instead.

Te Anau to Milford Sound. As mentioned this is a really scenic drive particularly after Te Anau Downs.
Lake Mistletoe. Around 28km from Te Anau the short 45 minute walk to this really beautiful glacial lake starts from a car park on the right immediately before reaching the Downs.

There is a well surfaced path which takes you through beech forest and then yellow broom bushes to reach the lake itself. From the lake the walk continues through more forest and brings you back on the Milford Sound road - with just a fairly short wander back to the car park.

Mirror Lakes. With plenty of roadside parking available on the left side of the road these small lakes are just a short walk away.

Mirror Lakes are famous in that with clear weather and nothing to ripple the lake's surface you get great reflections of the mountains in the lakes.

Knobs Flat. This is around 63km along the road from Te Anau - the meandering Eglington River runs along here and there are some really beautiful flowers including thousands of lupins - as well as excellent mountain views to be enjoyed.
There is one quite smelly toilet - and overnight camping area for a few campervans is available.

Lake Gunn. The lake is around 75km from Te Anau and reached by taking a track on the left - there are various parking and picnic areas off the track. The red beech woods here are truly beautiful to walk through - loads of moss and ferns and the lake itself is a picture. My wife is convinced that the really weird shaped trees - particularly their trunks - were the inspiration for the tree folk used in Lord of the Rings films.

The well marked path takes you to the lake and then follows it's edge for a short while before cutting back into the trees - however there is an old path which continues ahead along the lake for a while and then brings you to a stream and more open area - the views of the mass of pink and blue lupins, rocks and mountains here are brilliant. You can then turn left to follow the stream back towards the parking areas easily enough.

The Divide - Homer Tunnel - The Chasm - Milford Sound. The views on this stretch of the trip are really amazing - lots of waterfalls to be seen (dozens of them if recent rain), snow capped mountains, rocky streams. It is really difficult to go far along the road without wanting to stop to admire the views all the time. Watch out for the Kea if you stop for a while at the Homer Tunnel entrance car park - they love to destroy windscreen wipers for some reason. Homer Tunnel is just over 1.2km long and has a gradient of 1 in 10 - the tunnel is one way during the day and controlled by traffic lights - if you just miss the lights you can expect to wait around 15 minutes before getting a green light. There are several passing places inside the tunnel and two way traffic is allowed during the evening and night. The road surface is really bumpy inside the tunnel and the not so frequent yellow lighting makes it quite an experience to drive through.

Once through the tunnel there is a huge descent via switch backs deep into the valley - the mountain scenery is fantastic - more waterfalls coming off the snow capped mountains - more streams, lots of birds around - it's really good.
Around 10km before reaching Milford Sound you have to stop and take the 10 minute walk to see The Chasm - with the Cleddau River rushing through the lovely huge rocks this is an extremely picturesque series of small waterfalls.

The Sounds - general info. For both of the below trips you should take a waterproof jacket, a warm fleece, sunglasses and shoes or boots - the latter not because you particularly have to walk far - just that they are warmer and also better/safer for moving around on the cruise boats. The weather can change amazingly quickly as is well known in New Zealand - so a bright blue sky can easily become a downpour if the weather feels like it. It is also often very windy out on the Sounds and with the boats at times moving at 20kph or more into the wind you can get somewhat windswept.
Below we have only given a few words about both Sounds - we have instead included several photographs of what we saw which hopefully will give an idea about them. Incidentally apart from having our camera with us we also took binoculars - these were very handy for getting good views of the fur seals, bottlenose dolphins and sea birds which can be sometimes spotted along the way.
Booking Cruises. We saw plenty of advice prior to arriving in Te Anau that you should pre-book your trip into the Sounds - well in our case we knew that a lot of trips go from Milford Sound each day and when we turned up at Milford Sound around 1430hrs things were really quiet (this was the first week of December 2007) though apparently the morning cruises had been busy. We had no trouble booking our ride and in fact when the cruise left at 1500hrs there were only 9 of us on it - this was of course really great to have so few of us with the run of the boat. On the other hand we had already pre-booked the Doubtful Sound cruise several weeks previously - there are only a couple of trips a day and even in quiet early December our cruise had a lot of us on board - this cruise is probably one to pre-book.

Milford Sound. New Zealand's Milford Sound is located around 120 km from Te Anau - this is really important to note if you intend driving there because there are no petrol facilities after Te Anau - so ensuring at least 3/4 tank of fuel on board before leaving is adviseable. Note also that should you be driving down there in the winter you must have snow-chains available. There is quite a large amount of parking available at Milford Sound although the cruises are of course really popular and the car parks do fill rapidly especially in the mornings.

Opposite the main car park is a medium size cafe and you can also book various trips from there. The cruises all leave from a little further down the road from the car parks - perhaps about a 5 minute stroll. The various Cruise Companies have a large, clean and impressive building right by the jetty where you can book or buy tickets for the cruises - there are also toilets available within this building.

Doubtful Sound. Cruises for the Sound leave from Manapouri - which is around 25 minutes drive from Te Anau and about a two and half hour drive from Queenstown. The small town has a petrol station, a variety of accommodation and several restaurants. A reasonable amount of parking is available by the lakeside at Pearl Harbour and there is also more parking a few minutes walk away just off View Street. At Pearl Harbour jetty the cruise company has an office where you can buy tickets if necessary or redeem booked tickets for a boarding pass - you also pick up any pre-ordered packed meals here.

The above pictures are of Lake Manapouri.

A cruise on Doubtful Sound actually involves three separate parts - you take a boat from Pearl Harbour for a 60 minute trip along Lake Manapouri - then an hour long coach trip over Wilmot Pass (on our trip over the Pass the coach driver stopped several times so that we could enjoy the various views) to reach Deep Cove. This is followed by the cruise itself out towards the Tasman Sea and into the beautiful and serene scenery that is New Zealand's Doubtful Sound.

The return is of course a reverse of the outbound route except that when you get back over Wilmot Pass and back to West Arm some trips also include a drive down the 2km spiral tunnel to see the Manapouri Power Station machine hall which is contained in a granite cavern situated deep inside the mountain.

Kepler Trail. This fairly new 60km long tramping track (named after Johannes Kepler) was created in 1988 mainly to try and take some of the strain from Fiordland's famous and heavily used Milford and Routeburn Tracks. We just did not have the time to use 3 or 4 days of our New Zealand trip to go on this attractive sounding walk so we simply went to Rainbow Reach (reached via a track around 10km from Te Anau on the Manapouri Road) and walked out clockwise on it for a few kilometres.
Whilst walking through the wetlands you can take a short diversion to take a look at Amoeboid Mire (including a pretty lake). We went a little way past Moturau Hut before returning to the swing bridge which crosses the Waiau River at Rainbow Reach car park - a total distance of only about 11km.

Even with such a short section it was obvious that this is a really nice walking track - lots of forest and ferns, great views, many streams (all of which were bridged) to cross and then at Moturau Hut you can go onto a lovely deserted beach with marvellous views of Lake Manapouri. The only drawback just here was the presence of about fifty million sand flies - so not exactly a beach to sun bathe on sadly.

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