happy medium

Piopiotahi – carved by various glaciers over millions of years, now home to 1200 metre sheer rock faces, rain forest, tree avalanches, penguins, seals, dolphins and one of the highest rainfalls in the world. In fact it as likely to be raining here as not – raining 182 days of the year. That said, the two times I’ve been to the sound there has been glorious sunshine, go figure. Fiordland is dotted with fjords along it’s coast, but most are very difficult and remote to get to. Milford on the other hand has enabled over 500,000 visitors a year to get a taste of the wilderness.

Due to the massive forces caused by the glaciers carving out the hanging valleys – the layers of minerals found in the rock bed are forced up vertically. You can see all sorts of metals, such as copper and yep, even gold!

Some are pretty unimpressed by that:

The Sound meeting the Tasman Sea:

These guys are Yellow-eyed Penguins, and one of the rarest Penguins in the World with only 4000 left. Also known as Hoiho, they appear on the New Zealand five dollar note.

When it does rain, hundreds of massive waterfalls appear along the valley. They are a number of permanent falls – to which you can get very very close:

good example of scale with a two story boat:

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under happy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.