There's No Place Like Home....wait a minute - There Kinda Is!

We woke up early and groggily looked out the window to see – home! The sun was just coming up as we saw in front of us tall, snow clad mountains descending into dark, cold water, steep white waterfalls, shingle beaches with little streams running into them, ferns and moss and lichens and trees where they could grow, and bald rock where they couldn’t. Kayakers rounding a point in the inlet and a hostel building next to a sea plane stop. We even saw whales.

But then we saw an albatross and realized that we were in the middle of Milford sound, New Zealand, and not the BC which it so much resembled. Looking closer we could see the trees were different, there were no mammals to see, such as bear or deer, and virtually no seaweed or kelp. New Zealand’s south-western coast, known as Fjordland, contains many of these deep cold inlets, some of them very long indeed, so similar to those of BC’s western coastline. Carved by the glaciers and filled by melt, they house all sorts of bird and water life, free from all predators as there are no indigenous mammals in New Zealand, except for one bat species. A layer of algae grows between the salt water and the fresh water above, which makes it impossible to see deeply into the black water.

 Names like Malaspina and Bauza, familiar to us from the BC coast, are here too, named of the same chaps who charted Vancouver island and must have thought it was deja vue all over again down under. We are at the 47^th parallel (more or less) so growth is a little more exotic than at our 49^th-50^th line, but then there is no land south of here until Antarctica, unless you count the tip of South America way over there.

We spent the entire day on our deck as we followed the coast south, and turned into three of these deep-watered fjords: Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound and Dusky Sound. One the outside, the wind was brisk and the sea hurtled us along, but when we were in the sounds it was calm and quiet, so quiet you could hear birds in the trees on shore. We motored past little islands and bays, and peered through binoculars at fern trees, the world’s largest fuscias, and white trucked trees (eucalyptus?) so dense they don’t rot. One of Cook’s men had to take out a tree to aid soundings, and hurled the trunk into the nearby bay. Imagine their surprise years and years later when that same tree was still there, solid as ever. We were on the wrong side to see the dolphins, but we did see seals and two little penguins on a rock. Now that’s something you can’t see at home!

(not my photo!)