Day 166 Milford Sound, New Zealand

Monday 21st November 2005

9.12.05 18 °C

Well where do I start, I think today is nearly if not on a par with the boat trip in
Pahia to the Bay Of Islands.
We were booked on the Friendship boat and were due to sail at 4.45pm and it was costing us $145 and that was a reduced fee to. To my amazement the weather today couldn’t be any more different compared to yesterday. The sun was shining and apart from abit of a breeze it was a perfect day and even better as we would be able to get great views while out on the boat later.
We sat around reading in the hostel till around 2pm and then went off for a drive to look at some waterfalls and then had a short walk around the sea harbour before again we met up with Ibon who had been walking the Milford Track over the past 4 days and he had gotten totally drenched with the pouring rain over the past few days.
We boarded the boat at 4.15pm and as there were only going to be 11 of us on a fairly small boat I was looking forward to it a lot more than the boat that had 60 people crammed on it. I always find small groups tend to get on a lot better than huge ones and people tend to chat more and get to know each other but also its easier to relax and chill out if you want to. The plan was to sail out of the Milford Sound to the Tasman Sea and look at some of the spectacular sights along the way like raging waterfalls and various animals like seals and penguins. Then eventually we would find a place to stop and relax for the night and get up early and go kayaking for abit before heading back to the harbour. Well everything was going great for the first 2 hours or so we thought but then the captain comes up to us with a dilemma. He says hes having problems with the generator so either we could stay on this boat and probably have no power, lights or heat for most of the night or all of us jump on the Milford Mariner for free and join them.
Well the Milford Mariner would of initially cost us over $400 each and you get ensuite rooms, a bar, 3 course meal, huge breakfast and on a totally upmarket and much bigger boat. At first I was disappointed as I quite liked the little boat we were sailing on however everyone else wanted to leave so I joined them along with the 3 free bottles of wine we were given.
So eventually we all boarded the Mariner and found it to be full of mostly fat rich miserable unsociable old gits and here we were a fairly young bunch of troublemakers gatecrashing there party and we had paid a fraction of the price they had.
That night we enjoyed the free wine and a few beers and an awesome 3 course meal but the only problem was we weren’t sure if we would be getting the chance to go kayaking, however after some gentle persuasion they decided to let us go out before it got dark. Ive only ever been in a canoe once and was really looking forward to kayaking and it was just a shame it was only for around 25 minutes, however it was a lot more tiring than I thought it would be although I had just stuffed myself with endless amounts of food and wine. After the kayaking we sat around chatting for a few more hours before retiring to bed about midnight.

Reece's Ph..600 (2).jpg
Milford Sound