3/10/15 Milford Sound

We had a really long day today!  We boarded our coach for the five hour ride to Milford Sound.  We stopped along the way for potty stops and views.  This area is a national park that is larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite put together!  It is mountainous and in a cold, temperate rainforest - very beautiful.  The weather was sunny to drizzly to rainy.  Apparently, this area has rain 200+ days of the year.  We saw kea parrots outside of the tunnel, but were unable to stop the bus there to take pictures.  They are big and quite colorful as well as smart and sassy.  They like to chew on windshield wipers and rubber gaskets so the drivers tend to chase them off.  We got to Milford Sound in time to board our ship for a two-hour tour of the sound and into the sea.  It was quite drizzly, but I found a place with a bit of cover outside to take some pix of the many waterfalls in the area.  Most of the falls are taller than Niagara Falls, but quite skinny rather than wide.  We had a box lunch on the ship and a great ride.  When we got back, we stopped at the chasm, which is a wonderful spot where the rushing water has carved holes and curves into the rocks.  The ferns grow so tall in this region that I thought I might have been on the set of Jurassic Park.  We had a rest stop and a bubblegum blowing contest at one point and then continued on our way.  Di put "The World's Fastest Indian" on the TV.  I love that movie and it turned out that our young bus driver, Hamish, is related to the main character, Burt Munro!  Burt is his grandfather's cousin.  Burt died before Hamish was born, but he grew up with all the stories and actually got to sit on the famous Indian motorcycle!  It was almost 9 PM by the time we got back to town, so we decided to have a small meal from the bar menu of the hotel before going to bed.