Hi people,
It took several days to write after Milford, but we have been a bit cold (sick, and cold climate). I started taking antibiotics one day before the walk started, because my throat was hurting very much, the kind of pain I know it doesn't go away on its own. Unfortunately, this track works in a booking system, so we couldn't delay our walk. The track has such a demand, that you need to book several months in advance. Only 40 people are allowed to walk it per day, and they must stay in the provided huts. Camping with tents it's completely forbidden.
The track consists of four day (57km) walking across the Milford national park, and ends up in thr Milford Sound. Apparently, wrongly named as 'sound', the Milford Sound should be known as Milford Fiord, since the V shape of the mountain walls was formed by an ancient glacier. Some millions years ago, the oceans level increased, covering the valley with sea water. The geological explanation for the amazing scenery in Milford is that, the Indo-Australian plate meets the Pacific one below the Southern Alps, elevating mountains that were created well below the earth surface crust, containing rocks which are very hard. The glacier produced a strong erosion on this materials, but due to the extreme hardness of them, the gradient of the mountain remained very steep, sometimes almost vertical!
The hardness of the rocks also mean they are water tight, there is few soil available for water to drain when it rains, so any rainy days, amazing waterfalls appear everywhere.
It is this combination of steep and water that make this track also dangerous, in the brochure it is said that out of the four walking days you have to expect at least one with rain...well, we had two. Of the non-stop type...
But the rain was worth it, the firts two days we had only sun shine, and funny that we saw several dry waterfalls. They just looked like green lines going down the mountains, with no vegetation at all. So, it was good to have also some rain, it literally brouht he waterfalls alive!
The biggest ones, the Southern falls, with 580 meter of drop were massively tall, but seeing all the other going down everywhere was as amazing. I compare the sensation as if someone, up there in the mountains, had flushed a gigantic toilet, and the water was just coming down everywhere!
Milford is famous for its among the average yearly rainfall. It gets 8000 mm per year! That is, if I remember properly, more than ten times as much rain as Hamburg!
With those numbers in mind, little was our hope that in case of rain we would keep an inch dry... But because of our previous rain experience, we learned a bit, and under our jackets we were still 'a bit' dry. The shoes did a good job for the first two hours, thanks to a Juanma engineered trouser-water-deviating devices, made out of plastic bags :)
But after having to cross a couple of streams, and because of the non-stop rain, the shoes gave up, and we started walking on swimming pools...
Luckily we had all our stuff in the backpacks packed in plastic bags, because neither the backpack nor the backpack rain cover are waterproof. Here one of those things in life which are apparently a contradiction. Why is a backpack rain cover not waterproof? Man!
So, as we discovered this 'bug' already before, in Abel Tasman, we bought a 2.5$ plastic poncho from a Asian shop. It just worked! Better than the 100€ GORE blabla jacket.
A propós wet clothing, the only man with dry socks after the walk was a couple of Taiwanese that happened to do the walk on gum boots!
We got to know some locals, and curiously we met a couple of kiwis that we already knew from our Tongariro track walk, which we did almost two months ago in the northern island. The world is really small.
The kiwis told us, that you could tell whether a hiker was Kiwi or European depending on whether he/she would cross a stream avoiding to get wet or just walk through it.
The kiwis just walk on the water as if there was none, the Europeans after a while too ;)
Well, I think it is enough text for today, if I get the computer I will upload some more pics. The waterproof camera was a key components during the two days of wet-walk!
Cheers from Christchurch!
Jm
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