Milford Sound
Rudyard Kipling called it the eighth wonder of the world, and he was not exaggerating.
Milford Sound — Piopiotahi — is the most photographed place in New Zealand, and one of the very few that is better in person than in the photographs. It sits inside Fiordland National Park, part of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area, where glaciers spent two million years cutting vertical-walled trenches into solid rock.
Not actually a sound
A sound is a drowned river valley. Milford was carved by ice, which makes it a fiord — the name stuck from an early misidentification and nobody has bothered to change it.
Mitre Peak (Rahotu) rises 1,692 metres straight out of the water, one of the highest sea cliffs anywhere. The water itself is around 300 metres deep in places, deeper than the entrance, which is characteristic of glacial carving.
Go when it rains
Milford receives between 6,400 and 8,000mm of rain a year, making it one of the wettest inhabited places on the planet. Most visitors hope for a clear day. They are wrong.
Rain turns the cliff faces into hundreds of temporary waterfalls that appear within minutes and vanish just as fast. The two permanent falls — Stirling (151m) and Bowen (162m) — run regardless, and boats will nose right under Stirling if you are willing to get soaked.
Heavy rain also thickens the freshwater layer that floats on top of the seawater. Stained dark by tannins from the forest, it blocks light and lets deep-ocean species such as black coral live only a few metres down.
Getting there is the other half
The Milford Road (SH94) runs 120km from Te Anau through beech forest, past the Mirror Lakes and up into the Homer Tunnel — 1.2km of unlined rock hacked through the mountains and opened in 1954. Kea, the world's only alpine parrot, work the car park at the eastern portal and will strip rubber from your windscreen wipers given the chance.
Coach-and-cruise packages from Queenstown make it a long day (12+ hours). Flying in from Queenstown or Milford aerodrome cuts that dramatically and the aerial view over the Southern Alps is exceptional.
Header photograph by Maros M. r a z via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY / CC BY-SA.