Peaceful, lakeside Te Anau township is a good base for trekkers and visitors travelling to Milford Sound, and an ideal place to recharge your batteries. The tourism industry has ensured there’s always plenty to do here. Alternatively, on a sunny day it’s a beautiful place to just sit around and do very little at all.
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The famous Milford Track is a 53.5km walk often described as one of the finest in the world. The number of walkers is limited in the Great Walks season (late October to late April), and during that period you must follow a one-way, four-day set itinerary. Accommodation is only in huts (camping isn’t allowed).
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First sight of Milford Sound is stunning: still, dark waters out of which rise sheer rocky cliffs, and forests clinging to the slopes sometimes relinquish their hold, causing a ‘tree avalanche’ into the waters. The spectacular, photogenic 1692m-high Mitre Peak rises dead ahead. It’s a vista to make you go ‘ooo’. And there’s more – a cruise out on the waters of Milford Sound is the most accessible of trips on any of Fiordland’s famous sounds, complete with seals, dolphins and an almost guaranteed downpour of rain (an average of 7m per year!) that creates a spectacular deluge of cascading waterfalls and afterwards adds an appropriately moody mist to the scene.
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Strung along the beautiful Lake Manapouri, the town of the same name is largely used as jumping-off point for cruises to the sublime Doubtful Sound and as a base for walking expeditions. There’s very little to the town itself – little more than a handful of hotels, with a glut of sandflies to keep you hopping.
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Flat and suburban, with endlessly treeless streets, Invercargill certainly isn’t going to blow your senses if you came here via the Catlins or Fiordland. Nevertheless, most travellers in Southland will find themselves in Invercargill at some point – perhaps stocking up on supplies and equipment before setting off to the Catlins or Stewart Island – and it’s worth taking some time to investigate the town’s arty bits and the surprisingly good restaurants.
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The bottom end of the South Island has some of the country’s most spectacular landscape. To the west is Fiordland National Park, with jagged misty peaks, glistening lakes and an air of forbidding remoteness. The park can be accessed via the world-famous Milford Track, one of the various trails that meander through dense forests and allow views of spectacular mountains and glacier-sculpted canyons. Fiordland is also home to Milford and Doubtful Sounds, with forested cliffs soaring almost vertically from the still, deep waters, and relatively easy to access by road, boat or kayak.
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Fiordland is NZ’s rawest wilderness area, a jagged, mountainous, forested zone sliced by numerous deeply recessed sounds (which are technically fiords) reaching inland like crooked fingers from the Tasman Sea. Part of the Te Wahipounamu Southwest New Zealand World Heritage Area, it remains, for the most part, formidable and remote. Te Anau and Milford Sound see the bulk of the region’s tourists, and small towns hold its small permanent population.
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Although it’s home to the majority of Southland’s permanent population, for travellers the central bit of the province serves mostly as a through station. It’s almost at the Catlins, not far from Fiordland and the gateway to Stewart Island…so there’s plenty of reasons to pass through.
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Unimpressive little Bluff (www.bluff.co.nz) is Invercargill’s port, 27km south of the city. Really, the main reasons to come here are to catch the ferry to Stewart Island, pose for photos beside the Stirling Point signpost or buy some of the famous Bluff oysters straight from the wharf.
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