A cruise in southern Fiordland offers the ultimate experience for remoteness seekers, until the weather gods intervene, writes Yvonne Martin.

Leave your cellphone at home and slip the watch from your wrist, if you ever get the chance to cruise the southern reaches of Fiordland.

This is one of the few places left on the planet where time and telecommunications don't permeate.

It takes a little while to unplug, but for the next seven days on the Milford Wanderer all the news we want will be in the weather report.

We will spend our week exploring five glacier-carved fiords from Doubtful Sound to Preservation Inlet, the last fiord in the South Island's remote south- west corner before you slip off the map.

At land's end, a helicopter will provide a speedy, 20-minute transfer back to Manapouri – at least that is the plan.

We are seeing the rough-hewn western coastline almost as Captain Cook did over 200 years ago when he charted these waters and mighty fiords, kissed by mist and hallowed by rainbows, probing into the heart of the national park.

Come nightfall, we watch the sun slide behind layers of mountains, emblazoning the sky and waters with a palette of pinks and lilacs.

Time in these parts is told by different cues; the sinking sun, the ship's generator shuddering into life at 7am, the arrival of a crayfish feast at noon, fresh muffins at 3pm.

It is hard to believe that this vast emptiness was once the cradle of European settlement in New Zealand – the site of the first house and the first brewery.

After Cook came sealers, whalers and miners, staking their fortunes in what still looks like moa country, but few stayed long. Apart from some old chimneys, shafts and abandoned boilers too heavy to move, the forest has reclaimed most efforts at colonisation. This is remote tourism at its best, far from the madding crowd that tragically Milford has become by day.

The itinerary on this Discovery cruise is entirely dependent on the whim of the weather gods. Shore visits, kayak trips and even helicopter beach landings will also depend on the tide and Conservation Department concessions.

AdvertisementAdvertisementA mid-winter Fiordland cruise might sound risky, but June, July and August are the most settled months, often bringing fine, clear, crisp days.

The weather gods indeed smile on us, with little of the "liquid sunshine"for which the rainforests are known. Basking in this benign weather, none of us anticipate the effect a full moon and flood tide will have later in the trip.

Our departure from Doubtful Sound is so smooth and clockwork, you would swear it was scripted. Cue in silver bow- riding dolphins escorting us out to the Tasman Sea, mollymawks circling hypnotically ... then wonder of wonders, a fly-by from the most regal of birds, the royal albatross.

Cruise operator Real Journeys has advised us to pack seasick pills for two stints in the open sea (two to three hours each). Several of us are green-gilled, even in millpond conditions, but no-one succumbs.

We later hear horror stories of passengers lolling on the dining saloon's floor, too crook to move, during rough sailings. At such times, the chef knows he will be cooking for only a hardy few.

Many of the 34 passengers on this trip are retired or nearly retired farmers and trampers. All have a lifelong love of the outdoors. They are at home sloshing around in waterproof gear and gumboots, jumping off boats and walking on gnarly tracks during daily trips ashore.

A 13-year-old, the son of white- water rafting guides from Queenstown, reduces the average age to 60-plus, but we have a few inspirational octogenarians also.

Top of the pops is Barbara Simpson, from Kakanui, North Otago, whose legs are a striped symphony of rugby socks and funky Dr Seuss tights, tucked into tramping boots. (At home, she collects exquisite Italian stilettos.)

True to type, Barbara, 82, is celebrating her 59th wedding anniversary adventurously, with husband Lindsay, their son and daughter-in-law. Adding to the spice of professionals on this trip is a violinist from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, an eye doctor, and a lawyer reconnecting with home after many years in Manila.

We soon settle into the rhythm of ship life – a hearty cooked breakfast (the chef's fruity porridge earns cult status), a visit to ABB ("another bloody boiler"), a hearty cooked lunch, a walk on a secluded beach, a hearty cooked dinner. Somehow we find time and room for freshly baked morning, afternoon teas, and the odd aperitif.

In Dusky Sound's Wet Jacket Arm we go on a short safari with nature guide and "moose man" Ken Tustin and his wife, Marg.

In the ultimate test of their marriage vows, the pair have spent 14 months combing this bush for Canadian moose released in 1910 and once thought extinct. The passion of their conviction convinces us to join the hunt.

We find snapped and stripped branches, too high for a deer, but the only moose we are likely to see on this fleeting visit is on the dessert menu.

On the next trip, Marg finds droppings that look remarkably like moose. They are excitedly bagged and join another 34 samples in the Tustin's home freezer, awaiting DNA analysis by a moose poo expert arriving from Ontario next month.

At the entrance to Dusky Sound, Anchor Island also has remarkable wildlife. It is now home to 30 kakapo released here in an effort to boost their desperately small population of 86. Some are raffish young males exiled to this bird borstal, where they will hopefully charm a mate into breeding.

One of the bird fanciers among us is thrilled to chance across a kakapo feather, then a "snoring" rock on the walk track. His luck is in. They turn out to be the calling cards of a kakapo that has ducked into a hole, waiting for our entourage to pass.

Where else in the world can you stumble across flightless kakapo in the wild, sharing a beaten track with trampers? We cannot think of anywhere.

The father of Fiordland conservation, Richard Henry, learned a trick or two about kakapo while based on neighbouring Pigeon Island in the late 1800s.

He transferred hundreds of birds, mainly to predator-free islands, but was devastated to discover a stoat on a key sanctuary, Resolution Island.

We visit where "the hermit of Dusky Sound" carried out his lonely bird recovery, but missed the catch of a lifetime.

Just months after leaving the island in 1909, the Waikare cruise ship struck rock in the Sound. All 226 souls survived, and the unmarried women were ferried to Henry's hut, where they cleaned and arranged wild flowers in jam jars, awaiting rescue.

At the final fiord, Preservation Inlet, conditions allow a walk to a lighthouse on Puysegur Point, known as the place where ferocious weather unleashes on the West Coast.

Wind-whipped, leaning shrub topiaries remind us that this was once a Siberian-type outpost for lighthouse keepers, before the days of automation.

Normally this travel-log would finish with our departure the next day. But on our final day the weather gods decide our trip has been far too charmed, and they call for the moon's assistance.

A full moon brings a flood tide and our departure gets well delayed, waiting for enough beach to be exposed so that helicopters can land. Icy sub-Antarctic winds and heavy snow on mountain passes slow transfers to a dawdle.


It is on dusk by the time our party of six is airborne and headed for Manapouri. We make it over the first mountain pass, but pilot Richard Hayes is clearly having difficulty finding a safe passage over the next ranges.

"The weather isn't being too kind to us, is it?" he says in the understatement of the century. I am too scared frigid to answer and neither does anyone else.

Besides, we want to leave the radio channel clear for Hayes to guide the young pilot of a second helicopter, who seems to be finding the conditions challenging.

It is at this point that I desperately want to be back on the ship, grounded, anywhere in fact, but in this airborne tin can that is trying to find its way – and the other white aircraft – in the murk.

Topping matters off, this day happens to be a milestone birthday for me and I don't wish to be forever 40.

Finally, Hayes pulls the pin on the journey and tells the other pilot to head for the "Uni".

The Uni turns out to be a former Australian Navy support ship and ex-squid boat that Richard owns, moored in Breaksea Sound.

Both aircraft squeeze onto the decking and there is a surreal pinch- me moment when we are safely inside the Uni with little else than our lives and the clothes we are standing in.

A few red wines are sunk to numb the nerves and a birthday bubbly emerges from a cupboard.

Food is scarce, but we boil up a few packets of pasta, tossing in a few long-expired soups and flavourings, and the meal is devoured. Although not as cosy or well-stocked as the Wanderer, everyone is eternally grateful to be here. Bunks are located, duvets handed out and we hunker down till dawn.

By 8.30am we are airborne, enjoying the spectacle of a cauliflower white forest and cathedral mountains, which have lost their menace by daylight.

Only after landing in Te Anau we learn our pilot is the legendary "Hannibal" Hayes, who has been flying these fiords since the venison- recovery era of the 1970s and 1980s. The man who has clocked up more than 25,000 hours rescuing trapped trampers, climbers and fishermen.

Unbeknown to us at the time, our souls could not have been in safer hands.

We have seen conditions in this southern land flash from benign to inhospitable in a heart beat. Like the elusive moose of Dusky Sound, Fiordland is one wildebeest that won't be tamed by time, machine or man.