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  • Day 88

    There's a waterfall right above us

    February 2, 2020 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌧 17 °C

    Today we had two options: do nothing, or do a road trip to the famous Milford Sound. What we didn't do today, we'd do the next day. The weather forecast for both days looked simply terrible, so that couldn't decide it for us. We had to move hostels anyway today, so that made the difference: road trip!

    It was actually quite simple. We would just try to enjoy as much nice landscape as possible from the car and see if we could find some drier moments to get out in between. We set off on our 240km retour journey. The further we drove, the nicer the nature but the heavier the rain. While the clouds were also hanging low blocking the nice mountain views, they also added a mystical atmosphere. And when we reached the last third of the road the mountains came closer, the valley became more narrow and there were waterfalls everywhere, as if huge lakes on the mountain tops overfloated. Very very cool.

    We arrived in Milford Sound around 14:00, had lunch in the car and decided to wait on a parking for better weather. This turned out to be a bit naive. While reading and playing phone games in the car the weather got worse. It was suddenly thundering and the rain at times was so loud it led Susanne to joke "there's a waterfall right above us!".

    We were brave enough to get out nonetheless to take in whatever was actually visible. It wasn't too much at this point as mountains right next to us were only visible occasionally and most of the fjord just disappeared in the clouds. No sign of Mitre Peak, the mountain everyone takes pictures of usually. We didn't even see its bottom nevermind it's top. But we saw plenty of waterfalls and especially one of them was just enormous.

    On the way back we saw some waterfalls literally at the side of the road, with some of the water hitting the asphalt. While being such shit weather it was actually very cool to see the massive amount of water coming down the mountains. And on our way back we were even lucky enough to get to see the mirror lakes in dry conditions, so there was actually some sort of mirror effect.
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