Beattys Overseas

Beautiful Milford SoundSince Queenstown would be our final destination in New Zealand, we had the urge to see one more major destination before our departure. And what better destination than the famous Milford Sound, where Captain Cook sailed into from Australia and the Tasman Sea? Milford Sound is a good 2.5 hour drive from Queenstown, however, and I thought it might be a big time-saver if we signed up for a tour bus. I found the only company that left Queenstown after 8am (I’m no morning person, and the other company’s 6:50am departures were out of the question).

The tour thing is a double-edge sword, as you don’t have to worry about driving or getting the directions perfectly, and there’s built-in commentary with all the background that I would have read ahead of time, HOWEVER, you’re on someone else’s watch, and you’re inevitably going to be stuck with other passengers who are annoying. That being said, we’ve decided that tour buses aren’t for the Beattys Overseas, as we each felt restless and rushed throughout different parts of our Milford Sound day trip bus tour.

Captaín Cook´s view from the Tasman SeaMilford Sound is in New Zealand’s enormous Fiordland National Park. When it was discovered by British explorers, Milford was not accurately recognized as a fiord, since the Brits had no experience with this eco-phenomenon. A fiord is a large body of water that was created by the rapid melting of a glacier (see our Franz Josef journal entry for definition of a glacier). A sound is more like an overflown river, but those poor explorers didn’t know this, so the name Milford Sound stuck, even though it’s a fiord. It’s one of the largest and most visited fiords in the National Park, and our tour bus driver provided lots of other interesting yet overwhelming tidbits that I’ll spare you from reading here. The bus delivered us to the Sound where a tour boat took us on a 2-hour cruise of the Sound, I mean, Fiord, and all its marvels. There are large and steep cliffs creating the water’s border, and seals happily lay on huge rocks that have fallen into the water during landslides. Waterfalls are abundant, as the snow-capped mountains are always melting away into the fiord. The boat took us all the way out to the Tasman Sea mouth, where Captain James Cook and his crew once laid eyes upon New Zealand via this very same waterway. It must have been a daunting journey, as these fiords are often full of heavy weather and lots of fog. Back on the bus after the tour, and we stopped in a town called Te Aunu for a group dinner that we opted out of joining.

It was a long day on a non-luxury tour bus, but thankfully we were able to sit apart and take a row to ourselves. There were only a few other people on the tour under the age of 30, and we made friends with Sara, a recent high school graduate from Switzerland who’s on a 13-month gap year. We really liked meeting Sara and enjoyed listening to her travel stories which made us feel a bit like travelling lightweights.

Upon our return to Queenstown at 9:45pm, we were wiped. Well, I was wiped, and John begged me to perk up so we could go out on the town on our last Saturday night in Queenstown. I went to the bedroom to ‘freshen up’ but somehow wound up snuggled under the covers and sound asleep for John to disappointedly find me 20 minutes later.

Brews at the old courthouse. Bar is now called GuiltySunday, our last day in Queenstown was spent on foot, cruising the town some more and checking out the Sunday afternoon scene – which is very quiet considering that Saturday nights in this town last until 6am. Again, John is allowed to be disappointed at his wife’s Grandmotherly bedtime the night prior. We did find, however an outdoor patio at a quirky bar where we started chatting with a guy named Sully. Turns out, Sully is from New Haven, CT, went to Fordham in NYC, and is living here for a few months working and hanging out. It was fun to talk to another American for a while, and we met up again later that evening at another bar where live music required us to yell our conversations into each others’ ears. Rock & Roll Mate.

All in all, we had a swell stay in New Zealand. Our 16 days here were spent seeing many different sites and meeting a few cool folks along the way. The Kiwi people are extraordinarily welcoming, and their European/Maori cultural fusion is one for other countries to mimic (we think). I, for one, am a little sad to be leaving the land of endless “Wow, look at that view”-places, the land that loves their ice cream and their beer, and – perhaps most pertinent for me, considering our next destination – their lovely English language. Latin America, here we come. Er, I mean, nostoros vamos ahorita!