Milford Sound storm
We knew a storm was coming from the weather forecast – so we had decided to move our time at Milford Sound forward by one day, to enable us to see it in the sunlight. And what a good job we did!
The rain started overnight, and got progressively worst through the day. This is our view when we woke up, and when the rain eased off (slightly). Those waterfalls did not exist 12 hours earlier! The mountains at Milford Sound are made of granite, so the water simply pours off them.
Pictures don’t really capture the rain properly... so when Jess and I (foolishly?!) decided to walk into Milford Sound to see what the Sound looked like during a storm, this is what it was like...
As we had expected, the Sound was pretty impressive, even in deep cloud and pouring with rain – again, you can’t really tell how much it’s raining from the pictures – but we were soaked through our ‘waterproof’ clothes to the skin within about five minutes of starting our walk.
After a bite to eat at the caf̩, and a chance to (slightly) dry off, we headed out again to the end of the village, where the coaches arrive to drop off people to take boat tours out to the sea and back. These tours are really quite expensive Рbut the tourists only get a refund if the tour is cancelled, so even in this weather, the boat tours were running.
Anyway, here is what we could see...
Walking back we ignored this sign... foolishly, it turned out. The path was well-made and well looked-after, but nothing could quite withstand the amount of water pouring out of the sky, off the granite mountains, and over the path into the Sound.
We made it back to the Lodge, bedraggled and completely soaked – I suppose at least our boots were clean! We may as well have gone swimming in our clothes, we were that wet.
However, the Lodge has great facilities, so a warm shower, a cold beer, and a load of washing later, we were comfortably ensconced in the lounge area, on some extremely comfortable sofas for the afternoon.
Which it turned out was a good thing, as the weather got even worse.
We don’t know what the wind speed actually was, because we had no internet and no ability to check live weather information, but it was bending trees double, uprooted various trees along the road, and every few minutes a large branch would crash against the lodge – it was actually quite scary.
We couldn’t quite see our van from where we were sitting, but thankfully the worst that happened was our already-damaged (and hastily mended) wing mirror got twisted round 180 degrees!).
Once the storm had abated, and we’d had some dinner – what would you imagine two sensible people would do?
We drove into the village to see what we could see! Here are the falls above the Lodge and campground...
And here’s Bowen Falls, the largest waterfall in Milford Sound...
It was – of course! – spectacular. We could just about see Mitre Peak through the clouds. It had stopped raining by this point, so we decided to sort the van out before we drove back, in case the rain started again. However, we got attacked by a huge swarm of sandflies (if you’ve never heard of them, be glad).
After a hugely rushed and stressful time, we got the van sorted and drove back to the camp ground – with the back door open, to force all the sandflies out! And it worked!
We were tempted to hire one of the available rooms for the night, but the only one was a family suite, at the princely sum of $650. So we decided to stick with the van, and dry everything off another time.