Milford Sounds Daytrip

Well, the last two days, the four of us spent the time in the Fjorland National Park city of Milford Sound. It's a city in the middle of nowhere, population 170! There are no petral stations within 120km and the city has one bar/cafe. To get there, we drove through some more windy roads, although they were not the worst we have been through but there was snow on these and we actually went through a huge mountain tunnel with no lights and went straight through the moutain, about 2 miles. The weather at the sounds is almost always rainy and a clear day is very rare and sure enough, it was rainy most the time. We got onto one 2-hour cruise boat that was actually the smallest, holding 150 people but we only had 9 people on the boat so there was plenty of room to move around. The trip started out very cold and was raining, I was wearing 4 shirts, 3 long-sleeved. But, as we progressed, the weather got much nicer and we started to see blue skies near the mouth of the ocean. As we turned around, we came upon 4 dolphins that were actually quite large and swam along side us for a long time, surfacing occasionally. It was really awesome! The skies also started to clear up so we could actually see some of the peaks that jutted right out of the water, going straight up to around 2000 meters. Since the rock went pretty much straight down too, we were able to get right up to the rock and see a seal from about 10 feet away and go right up to a waterfall that was 180 meters up. The water itself is about 150 meters deep close to the rock and in the middle of the passage was 300 meters deep. Anywhase, the boat ride ended up being a lot better than it looked like it would and I got some great pics that i'll post later. The drive home too had great views of the alpes and different mountain ranges. And, to top of the trip, we almost ran out of gas, getting within 3 liters of being empty, which the petral guy, that we hunted down in a bar because his station was closed, said was a record, so go us! This trip is awesome!!!