Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Fiordland & Stewart Island/Rakiura Tramps
1
Hollyford Track (North,
Click here
)
2
Hollyford Track (South,
Click here
)
3
Milford Track (
Click here
)
4
Kepler Track (
Click here
)
5
Hump Ridge Track (
Click here
)
6
Rakiura Track and Stewart Island North West Circuit (
Click here
)
FIORDLAND NATIONAL PARK
NZ's largest national park is a truly great wilderness, and you don't have to look too hard to
see why it buddies up with the Egyptian pyramids and the Grand Canyon in the list of World
Heritage sites. It is jagged and mountainous, densely forested and cut through by numerous
deeply recessed sounds (technically fiords) that reach inland like crooked fingers from the
Tasman Sea.
It remains formidable and remote, with the rugged terrain, rainforest-like bush and abund-
ant waterways having kept progress and people out of much of the park. The fringes of Fi-
ordland are easily visited, but most of the park is impenetrable to all but the hardiest
trampers, making it a true wilderness in every sense. The most intimate way to experience
Fiordland is on foot.
It is not the only way, though, as more than 500,000 annual visitors to Milford Sound can
tell you. Of that number - many of whom flock in during the peak months of January and
February - some 14,000 arrive by foot via the Milford Track. This isn't just Fiordland's
most famous track: it is often labelled the 'finest walk in the world'. The rest of Milford
Sound's visitors arrive via the 119km Te Anau-Milford Highway (SH94), an intensely scen-
ic byway passing through the sheer-sided and beautiful Eglinton Valley, and the Divide, the
lowest east-west pass in the Southern Alps. Prepare to be amazed.
Indeed, one of the first impressions trampers gain of the park is of the almost overpower-
ing steepness of the mountains, an impression accentuated by the fact that they are usually
separated only by narrow valleys. The rocks and peaks of Fiordland are very hard and have
eroded slowly, compared to the mountains of Mt Aspiring and Arthur's Pass, which are
softer. Gentle topography this is not. It is raw and hard-core all the way.
