The further south we rode, the more beautiful the scenery has become. According to our motorcycle atlas of New Zealand the road from Queenstown to Milford Sound was among the top rated. It got all the stars.
In this area of the Southern Island there is almost no traffic at all. No more than 15 cars have passed us on the way during each hour of driving to Te Anau. Moreover, we’ve seen people only when we stopped to warm up and have a coffee in a small town on the way. We’ve read that the Southern Island is not crowded, but this was still surprising. The fact that we were there in the late Autumn probably influenced it as well. Just to give you an idea: there is 1 million people living on the New Zealand’s South Island, of which 600 000 live in two cities Christchurch and Dunedin. That leaves only 400 000 people for the rest of the territory, which is the size of half of Poland. And Poland has 38 million inhabitants. Pure nature around. The only sound we’ve heard was the wind and our motorcycles, of course.
Milford Sound has a funny story with its name. It was named in 1812 after Milford Haven (a town in Wales) so that is quite clear. However, it is not a sound. A sound is a valley created and shaped by a river and Milford Sound was made by a glacier, which makes it a fjord. When the discoverers noticed their mistake they decided to make up for it by creating a national park of the area where Milford Sound is located and they named it Fiordland National Park. Well, they made another mistake – a spelling one this time. Fjord is a Norwegian word spelled with j so it should be Fjordland and not Fiordland. Yet, for us it did not make any difference as the beauty of Milford Sound got us totally mesmerized.
