Ecotourism

4 days and 3 nights of trekking the Milford. What a wonderful experience, and one of the best yet. The track hugs a stunning turqoise river for the first 2 days where you are surrounded by beech forest, moss covered stones and plenty of small river crossings and waterfalls. The weather was perfect, not a single cloud for the first 2 days. I was told that 2 days of the month are rain free days, the rest rains every day, so we were all very lucky to experience weather like that! The clear river was just so inviting that I donned the swimmers and head over for a swim however that river water was fed from mountains, so really it was melted snow, so got the ankles wet and that's about all, oh, and the sand flies nearly ate me alive so was out of there pretty quickly!

Day 3 and it was all uphill to the top of the 1200m high mountain. With a 25kg pack and the pouring rain this was going to be a challenge! At the top there was a small hut for all of us independent hikers to get shelter from the elements..what a sight to walk into a tiny hut full of rain soaked trekkers holding mugs of coffee! It was blissful. Down hill was pretty dangerous, you wouldn't find a track quite like it in Queensland there would be handrails at every corner! The trail was steep and the track was mainly loose rock where in many parts with water cascading over it, I only fell 3 times I thought it would have been way more than that. Seeing that hut at the end of the day was such a relief, I had eaten half a packet of Nurofen to take the pain away from my knees so my dinner of rice and instant Mongolian Lamb was just scrumtious!

Final day, day 4, we all awoke to an earthquake at about 4.45am. I had never experienced that before and admit feeling pretty scared laying in my sleeping back with the hut shaking. But that was the alarm clock for the day so it was a very early start. Passed so many huge waterfalls on the final day that I was taking them for granted. Day 4 must have been that second sunny day that we were told about, it was perfect, and finished the 18.5km last day hike around 1pm in plenty of time to take all the wet clothes out of the pack and lay them in the sun waiting for the 2pm boat to take us all back to the mainland ready for the cruise around the Milford Sound.

Here is the link to prove that we all did wake up to a 5.9 earthquake: http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/2829153g-maps.html

Clinton Valley

River that ran parallel to the path