Queenstown to Milford Sound

To get from Queenstown to Milford Sound is not as easy as it might look on a bird’s map. The two towns are only about 40 miles apart, but it’s 40 miles over the the Southern Alps’ Main Divide. For those of us without wings, our road is 180 miles and a ~4 hour trip each way. On our day trip to Milford Sound, we were lucky to have Greg as our GreatSights bus driver / tour guide. When Greg saw my camera (or maybe it was Bryan’s beer t-shirt?), he invited us to sit in the front row so that I could more easily move into the front door’s jump seat for good photos at key viewing points. 

Like all of the bus drivers, Greg knew his New Zealand. He told us so many things about his country…I couldn’t write fast enough to get them all down and ended up with fragments like “can’t chop fallen trees”. We stopped several times that day for sights, and for bathroom breaks, or as Greg said in his sparkling wit, “to spend a penny”. Roadside sights included Mirror Lakes, a river near Livingstone which Greg assured us was 100% pure to drink from “just like the ads said”, and the Chasm. The Chasm is a dramatic and deep gap where the water of the Cleddau River falls, swirls and bubbles down among the sculpted rocks and caverns beneath two viewing bridges.

We passed a marker indicating we were at 45 degrees South, the halfway-point between the Equator and the South Pole. How lucky and strange if felt to see that, remembering that I’d been at 45 degrees North in November with my mother somewhere in Oregon! What a big wide world.

The Divide

We were on our way to Milford Sound. A place that has been called the 8th wonder of the world. Equally impressive and awesome was The Divide, and the Homer Tunnel that goes through to Milford Sound. We were passing through the Fiordland National Park, the land becoming rocky, dramatic, treeless, and dwarfing our bus. Greg explained that the Divide runs from Greymouth to Invercargill and that the area around Fiordlands has more earthquakes than anywhere else in New Zealand because it sits on three fault lines. He reassured us that *only* 2,000 quakes were actually felt in 2016, the rest were imperceptible. The bus was all whispers and shutters snapping as we made our way into the valley between the rock mountains. The tops of those mountains were only visible if you stretched your head to your knees to look up out your window, or if you looked straight up, out the thoughtfully-planned glass roof of the GreatSights bus. We slowed to get in the queue for the Homer Tunnel.

Greg told us the story of the tunnel as we waited to go into the tiny entryway. The Homer Tunnel is a 0.75 mile-long tunnel through solid rock. Construction began in 1935 with a team of just 5 men with pickaxes. Other men joined them, and working in tough conditions, they managed to break through to the other side in only 5 years. However, it took much longer to widen and complete the tunnel because of World War II, and an avalanche in 1945. The tunnel finally opened in 1954 after 19 years of construction. It is wide enough for a bus and a car to pass each other, but lights regulate a one-way flow of traffic.

We entered the mouse hole and felt the road begin its steep decline, the wet tunnel walls so very close to the bus windows. Greg told us that this area receives an astounding 39+ feet of rain every year. As we exited the tunnel and saw the breathtaking steep road winding down into the Cleddau Valley, Greg’s voice quaked in pride, “It makes me the luckiest man in the world to have this as my workplace…imagine this on a rainy day when the sun breaks through, water pouring off these mountain walls like a champagne waterfall. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ll ever see.”

Milford Sound

Milford Sound, or the sing-song Piopiotahi in Maori, is grand, is moody, and is all the things you’ve ever heard describing it. Our 2+ hour lunch cruise took us out past forested fiord mountains, low-flying clouds, deep blue-gray water, and a hard-misting rain. Everything seemed black and white, unnaturally quiet, and Jurassic. We were nothing there on that water, just dots on a dot, on a trickle of water running between those ancient mountains. We passed through the bad weather into the blue skies of the Tasman Sea at the end of fiord. The boat came back into a completely different weather system, sunny and lighthearted now instead of the moody Milford we’d felt on the way out. Dolphins passed our boat from behind, criss-crossing in front like it was a race. Young male seals watched us as we watched them. The cruise captain stuck the nose of the boat under a waterfall, rainbows shooting out in the water droplets blowing back over the boat. Small prop planes took off over us giving bird’s-eye view tours.

My favorite part of this day will always be the image of a champagne waterfall in the Divide, and the shaky voice of a proud Kiwi describing the incredible view he is lucky to see every day.

If you are going to New Zealand, we have unused bus pass hours for two people for sale at a discount. We have 17 hours each for 2 people which is a $175 USD ($260 NZD) total value. We’re selling the hours for $150 USD total. Payment can be made via Paypal, and with a quick name transfer at InterCity.co.nz, the passes will be yours. The pass hours are good for these GreatSights bus or Interislander ferry services. Travel has to be completed by January 5, 2019. Comment or message me if you’re interested!

To read more about New Zealand’s bus tours and ferry rides, please see these posts:
Bus to Queenstown
Ferry to the South Island