Tom M. Wilson

Yesterday I, and an English guy I picked up hitchhiking made our way to Milford Sound, in the bottom south-west corner of New Zealand. The route into the sound is through steep valleys covered in beech forests and alpine grasses. The amount of water falling from the sky around here is seriously large, and when it isn’t raining all this water tumbles down cascades and waterfalls, like this one…

After making our way through a tunnel through the guts of a vast grey, rocky mountain which looked like a war-lord’s castle, we came down in altitude to the sound.

Here you stand at sea level, and look up to cliffs and peaks that shoot up vertically to two thousand metres. With all this grandeur it can be easy to forget the smaller details…

Going out on a boat on Milford Sound was strange. Everywhere you look the scale of the cliffs and the lush hanging gardens on the cliffs, seems implausible. Another boat passes by a waterfall on the other side of the sound, and you realise how an otherwise quite large vessel is made to look like a grain of sand at the base of the waterfall. The boat came up to the face of the cliff at many points and upon looking upwards at the falling water and clinging trees I had the feeling that this was hardly real. A baroque reality.

After going out to the Tasman Sea the boat turned around and we faced the entrance. I imagined being a lost sailor and coming to this shore, not knowing this was New Zealand. What would I think? I’d scarcely believe that this amalgam of something out of Rober Louis Stevenson and Samuel Taylor Colderidge was actually planet earth.

Standing in the Sound and looking around the ampitheatre the hardest thing to fathom is that there are 13 other sounds, very much like this. Now that knowledge really makes one feel insignificant.

This morning I’m in Queenstown and today I’m heading down out of the high country, down to Geraldine, and hence to Samoa tomorrow.

I’ve been at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu, near Queenstown, for the last few days. I thought Western Australia was young when it came to the arrival of the white skinned folk, but they didn’t get to New Zealand till around 1840, and to this valley till around 1860. More than other places I’ve been, Western civilization is a fledgling creature.

Red beech bark…

A bold visitation from a miromiro? If you know what this bird is let me know. I and another photographer were walking through the beech wood on Saturday morning when this little fellow decided to pose for us. He came within five centimetres of my ankles, and then jumped on this fungi covered log, when I took this shot.

Kinloch Lodge’s view over the water… We’re at about four hundred metres here and those mountains are about two thousand metres tall. The light falls over the tussock grasses and tumbles down through storm clouds, and there is literally a different mountain every ten minutes to look at.

Colours of the forest floor…

The road to Kinloch…

Beechwood is found deep in the valley, and goes up to 1150 metres, at which point the alpine tussock grasses take over. With the coming of climate change the beech woods will literally be – and already are – marching up the mountain sides in New Zealand.

Tonight I’m in Te Anau, and tomorrow I’m going on a boat on Milford Sound, a fiord in the wilderness.

I flew over from Sydney on an Air New Zealand plane a couple of days ago and looking beneath me I saw the Southern Alps, with their empty, wide, brown valleys, and craggy peaks. A man from flat and olive coloured Western Australia finds himself in tall mountains, and his soul swoops up with the crests of the snow dusted summits. Honestly.

I stayed in Geraldine, a small town at the foot of the moutains, on the first night. The next morning I stepped outside to see giant sequoias growing in the Geraldine camp ground where our wee white cabin stood. The air was cold and crisp, and the air was still and bright. This evening I’m staying in an old farmhouse just outside Twizel, up on a spacious plateau in the moutains. The fire warms the sitting room, but otherwise it is pretty cold in the evenings, if the days are surpringly warm. The land is dry here, after a long dry summer, and not nearly as green as last time I was in New Zealand one November.

The rivers run cold and clear over grey pebbles.

The colour of the water comes from some mineral – silica I think – suspended in the glacial melt.

Light and shadow battle it out.

Tomorrow is my birthday – I’m turning 29 – and I’m happy to say that I’ll be staying at Kinloch Lodge (there is a link to the place on my links page, under places), a beautiful place north of Queenstown. If anybody wants to ring me, you can use the number on my welcome page, or use the number of Kinloch on their web page.

And yes, the view from this rock was pretty good.