Fiordland Explored

Today was spectacular! We drove about 2 hours to Milford Sound for a cruise of the sound and the fiords. I've never been on any type of cruise ship so this alone was a treat. We booked the smaller of the two boats because our cruise boat offered an on board naturalist. We probably had 25 people on our ship and the boat seemed very large and spacious for so few people. I don't even know how to begin to tell you how amazing the cruise was and how much we learned in a little over two hours. A good starting point I suppose is with a definition of a sound and a fiord but I don't want to bore you if you already know and I don't feel much feel like writing a lecture, so let's just say the area is the arm of an ocean with mountains all around so it looks sort of like lakes in the ocean.http://www.milford-sound.co.nz/ The scenery is really out of this world absolutely breathtaking. A couple of things we learned. New Zealand has way too many possums and is trying all sort of things to kill them off. We were told if we hit a possum while driving to be sure to backup and run over it again! Possums were brought to NZ for their fur but have become a real nuisance in the last 100+ years since possum fur went out of fashion. There is only one colorful tree native to NZ it' s called the Rata tree and produces a bright red flower. There were no bees in NZ so the trees didn't need to be colorful to attract the bees for cross pollination. Moths pollinated and the only flowering trees had white flowers to be seen in the dark by moths before bees were introduced. Lobster is one of New Zealand's biggest exporting tons to Asia. The species of fern trees seen throughout the rain forest in NZ is over 100 million years old. We also saw a chasm today after we completed the cruise, another sight not to be missed in Fiordland. Well it's getting late and we have to get an early start tomorrow because the drive is over 6 hours. Good night