Early morning in Milford Sound. Photo / Simon Wilson
It’s that time of year when we look back and reminisce about our top travel experiences in 2023: the highlights and special moments that just might inspire your next adventure in 2024. This article was one of the stories that our readers enjoyed the most in 2023.
We eased around the spit that guards the entrance as the light began to fill the sky. Calm sea, mist rising and falling in the high forbidding hills. The decks and gangways filled with people. No sign of human habitation anywhere out there. Just us.
Milford Sound. The heart of everything. Botanist Robert Vennell, from the Auckland Museum, came on the PA with an excellent account of early Māori stories of the place. A pod of dolphins surged beneath the bow, leaping and twisting over and under each other, racing along, two calves swimming valiantly to keep up. The largest dolphins did most of the showing off.
“Can you hear them singing?” said the 20-year-old next to me, as we leant above them, peering down. I looked at her in sudden dismay.
“They’re singing right now?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re singing now.” The sound delighted her. I could not hear it at all.
It had been raining and the waterfalls were flowing and as we cruised gently to the head of the sound we still had the place to ourselves. No buses had arrived, the busy day had not begun.
The sun shone through the mist in golden stripes on the canyon walls. The Zodiac driver Yuri took our tour leader, Aaron Russ, out on the water, the two of them not sitting down but standing in the deep green immensity and the silence. Another cruise ship arrived, but it stopped far back towards the sound’s entrance and soon left again. Had its passengers got the magic they were promised?
However fleeting their visit, it was at least better than the fate of five other ships in the area during our time there. They failed their hull inspections and were therefore banned from entering the sounds or berthing at some ports. You can’t have barnacles and toxic weeds on your bottom.
Tourism operators made a point of blaming the cruise-ship operators, not the regulations, and rightly so. There’s no point to environmental tourism if biosecurity isn’t preserved. But five ships!
We were gone by 8.45am, sailing south with a following sea, past each gash in the mountains, one fiord after another, surf on the rocks, the mist still sliding up and down, the albatrosses streaking along, wings unmoving, far out over the water.
Our ship was the Heritage Adventurer, a boutique cruise vessel with 110 passengers and 90 crew, operated by Heritage Expeditions, a company owned and run by the Russ family and dedicated to environmental tourism. We’d sailed south from Bluff just before New Year, to explore the island wonders of the Subantarctic Ocean, before returning to call in at Rakiura (Stewart Island), where half the passengers disembarked and a new crowd joined us.
Now we were halfway through our adventures in Fiordland – Milford was the northernmost fiord on a trip that also took in Dusky, Doubtful and Breaksea Sounds. We went sightseeing, skidded around on Zodiacs, filled up on great piles of food and scientific and historical lectures delivered by the research experts and adventurers who also served as our shore guides, safety officers and Zodiac drivers.
And we tested ourselves – on a strictly optional basis – on some long tramps through the wet, muddy depths of that extraordinary bush.
First stop was Dusky Sound, and we returned there for our last shore visit too. James Cook came to Dusky to observe the Transit of Venus, and the stumps of the trees he cleared to set up an observatory are still visible. The clearing itself is filled with tall sturdy saplings now and you walk among them, imagining.
The hillsides are precipitous, craggy peaks looming beyond. The mixed podocarp bush blankets everything to the waterline, just a thin skirt of rock when the tide is low, hardly a beach to be seen anywhere. Beneath you, the deep green water, clearer than seems real because it’s full of tannins.
The sunsets are stupendous and on the good-weather days, the fiords are brimming with sunshine. Other days, everything is grey and gorgeous and if it isn’t raining you know it soon will be. Each morning and again in the afternoon, we clump our way down the gangway to be handed by grinning sailors into the Zodiacs, and there we sit, sea-sprayed, bouncing towards the shoreline, wide-eyed, thrilled.
Dusky is where the conservationist Richard Henry came, more than a hundred years ago, living in a tiny hut in the sodden bush, with a dog and, for a while, a young assistant for company, at war with the rats and stoats, in search of kākāpō.
He was a desolate man. He knew mustelids were killing the birds but had once taken a job unleashing ferrets at Te Anau, to keep down the rabbits, because he could not find any other way to earn a crust. And then he worked out his life in penance, taking birds to refuge on Anchor Island in the mouth of Dusky. Further from the mainland than almost any other island in Fiordland. Eventually, the stoats swam across.
It’s like a Gallipoli story, heroic and dark, only with a lot more rain, the failure somehow sealing the virtue of the attempt. Everything he left behind has been smothered in vivid, tangly moss.
There are 22,500 stoat traps in Fiordland now, but it’s not enough: they control the animals but they don’t eradicate them. Already 38 species of birds have been lost; there will be more.
There’s a history of shipwrecks here, and spartan occupation, prospectors and explorers, cod fishing and millions of crays. Cook discovered a family hiding here, deep in the bush. He may have alerted the people hunting them to their presence.
In the afternoon we climb into our muck boots, lined and so super-heavy-duty they make all other gumboots seem like cardboard clown shoes. We wrap ourselves up to be as waterproof as we can, clamber across a beach of beautiful rounded stones and set off on a DoC trappers’ “track” around Pigeon Island, where Henry had made his home.
Mostly, it’s one treacherous stream bed after another, with rocks and snags at every step and muddy embankments in between to climb up and over. The pouring rain does not stop. There’s a lake in the middle of the island, birds calling to each other across the water.
On we tramp, on comes the rain, on we climb. It’s exhausting and dangerous and we are soaked all the way through. No one turns their ankle. Everyone who falls gets up again. It is a magnificent day.
Back on board, we eat, sleep, rinse and repeat. The ship surges through the night, another fiord, another adventure. You start to think, could I live like this? The guides do: they’re on leave from their jobs at DoC, at museums and research institutes, building their own experience, sharing their love for this great wilderness.
On each trip, it’s random who you’re with. One day you might get Andy “the bird-nerd”, which turns out to be a good day to see the falcon, kārearea, streaking across the water in a lighting attack on the nest of a pair of tōrea: oystercatchers. The predator didn’t seem to come away with anything, but the prey kept up their screeching for a long time afterwards.
Another day, you might have Glenda Darling, a geologist who once discovered the tooth of a prehistoric megashark. Somewhere around here. The rocks come alive as Glenda talks about them, so to speak.
And then there’s Tim Flannery, on board as a featured speaker. The climatologist and former Australian of the Year is actually a mammal scientist specialising in bats: he’s discovered a new species in Papua New Guinea and one evening delivers an eye-opening talk on our own bats. And a few of the rest: a third of all mammals alive today, he says, are bats.
Wait, what? This is a trip of astonishments.
When Flannery’s talk on climate change is announced, the cocktail lounge fills to bursting. He reckons climate scientists divide into pessimists and optimists, although he adds that, being scientists, they would all say they are realists.
The pessimists believe we’re too late, or will very soon be too late, to prevent catastrophic global warming. The optimists argue that progress is accelerating and as long as that continues, with urgency, we will probably not be too late at all.
Flannery is a sunny optimist, a genial round-faced man who delivers his relentlessly uplifting message in a broad Aussie twang.
Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, he says, passed last year, contains funding for “the largest human reduction in emissions in the world, ever”. Seaweed farming has “much more potential” than forests to sequester carbon, and we’ve hardly got started on it. “Carbon-negative” concrete has been invented and we may soon have viable alternatives to jet fuel.
China is beating its targets, the war in Ukraine has hastened change and in Australia, he declares, it will be “only seven or eight years before there is no coal in the system”.
You could run a power station on optimism like this. It does one a world of good to hear it.
And, Flannery adds, protein grown in vats will enable the world to “retire an immense acreage of agricultural land”. Whoa. He said that, in New Zealand?
Oat milk, he says. Non-animal protein is already happening. Flannery has had a long association with Heritage Expeditions and is often hired as a speaker on their voyages. He’s terrific.
At Breaksea Sound we Zodiac to shore and walk up into the beech forest, then across the bottom of a vast slip, triggered only a few years ago by a richter 8 earthquake. One of the guides reminds us the Alpine Fault, which runs right up through the South Island, has been triggered without fail every 300 years, or thereabouts. The last time was in 1715.
Past the slip we come to a wild, curving beach: the sea dragging viciously at the stones, but with smooth rocks and a surprising spread of sand at one end, great drifts of logs and seaweed and thousands of little blue jellyfish stranded in piles. Desolation and beauty, with sandflies. They swarm around you, wherever you go. The bite isn’t sharp, but they never let up.
You’re tired and excited, all the time. They set out more mountains of food, the beds are splendid and in the morning you’re good to go again.
Late one night I discovered another passenger on the ship’s bridge, taking advantage, like me, of the everyone’s welcome 24/7 policy. He was fiddling with the knobs. Bloody hell, I thought, this isn’t good. Until I realised he was the pilot sent to guide us back to Bluff.
It was the last night. It seemed awful. We had to go home.
DETAILS
Heritage Expeditions visits Fiordland and the Subantarctic islands on a number of itineraries departing throughout the year. For more information, see heritage-expeditions.com
This story was originally published on July 11, 2023
When there's nothing as far as the eye can see, you may appreciate the company.