Milford Sound

Milford Sound is the fiord that Kipling called the eighth wonder of the world, and it is not a sound: fifteen kilometres of sea driven into the mountains of Fiordland by a glacier, three hundred metres deep, with walls of granite that rise twelve hundred metres straight from the water — Mitre Peak on the south shore, sixteen hundred and ninety-two metres and the most photographed mountain in the country; the Lion and the Elephant on the north — and waterfalls that fall into it from the sky: Bowen, a hundred and sixty-two metres, at the head by the wharf, and Stirling, a hundred and fifty-one, halfway down, where the boats put their bows under the spray. It rains here nearly seven metres a year on a hundred and eighty days, and the fiord is at its best in the rain, when a thousand temporary falls come off the walls; the sun brings the mountains out sharp and the sandflies out hungry. Its Māori name is Piopiotahi, for a single piopio, the thrush that came with Māui and is extinct now; Cook sailed past its hidden mouth in 1770 without seeing it, and a Welsh sealer named it for Milford Haven in 1812. Below the water, in Harrison Cove, an observatory ten metres down looks at black coral that grows in the dark of the fresh-water layer; the seals lie on Seal Rock, the Fiordland crested penguins come ashore in spring, and dolphins ride the bows.

The traveller comes from Te Anau by the Milford road — a hundred and twenty kilometres and two hours that are themselves the journey: the Eglinton valley, the Mirror Lakes, the Homer Tunnel bored through the granite in 1954, the Chasm — or from Queenstown on the long day, twelve hours there and back, or by small plane over the mountains; takes the two-hour cruise to the Tasman mouth and back, on the smallest boat available and the earliest or latest sailing, when the coaches are gone; adds the kayak on a still morning, or the observatory; and, if there is a night to spare, sleeps aboard in Harrison Cove and wakes to the fiord empty. Walkers arrive the old way: the Milford Track, fifty-three kilometres and four days from the head of Lake Te Anau over the Mackinnon Pass to Sandfly Point across the water from the wharf, the finest walk in the world by its own long-standing claim, booked months ahead for the summer.

The Guide's honesty: Milford is the most visited place in Fiordland by far — close to a million a year before the pandemic, most of them for a few hours in the middle of the day — and the country has been debating for years how to cap the numbers, close the small airstrip, and charge for the road; the traveller who comes early, late, in rain, or overnight sees another fiord altogether; the road closes for avalanche in winter and the traveller checks it the morning of; the sandflies are a fact of the place, and Māori legend says the goddess of the underworld released them so that no one would linger too long in so much beauty; the mobile signal is nil and the village has one hundred and twenty residents and one shop; and the head of the fiord at seven in the morning with the cloud lifting off Mitre Peak and Bowen Falls loud in the silence is, quite simply, one of the finest sights the sea has ever made.