After finishing up my kayaking trip with Rosco’s Milford Kayaks, I had all the time to kill in the world. Lack of a car made it very difficult to get out of Milford Sound and the weather was too incredibly nice to spend it lazying around Milford Sound Lodge. With the US dollar’s strength, I was livin’ large, so I booked the last cruise for the day in the sound with Mitre Peak Cruises.
Milford Sound is one of the must-see places in New Zealand, according to anyone who has ever heard of New Zealand. After coming off the Routeburn Track, I hopped on a bus to Milford Sound. The standard sound exploration is via boat cruise. I wanted something different; I wanted to work for my experience, so I booked a trip with Rosco’s Milford Kayaks for the Stirling Sunriser trip. I was going to kayak under a waterfall!
My trip to New Zealand was my first ever international solo trip. Well, my first real big solo trip, ever. The idea of figuring out transport from destination to destination was really daunting. Really, really daunting. Normally I’d be okay with renting a car but factor in hours and hours of driving and the whole driving on the other side of the road thing and that idea died pretty quickly. I hate driving, except for the fact that I can sing along to my favorite country songs.
I considered hopping on the Kiwi Experience for a good period of time as it touched a little bit of everything I wanted to do. As I kept researching, my itinerary ended up diverging from the trip’s itinerary, and frankly, I like the outdoors more than I like being outgoing. After booking my huts for the Routeburn track, I said hell with it, I’ll figure out how to travel around the South Island without a car. To my surprise, it was surprisingly easy.
When I booked my New Zealand airfare, I kind of balked at the price. To compensate for being a lazy bum and paying extra for a nonstop flight, I decided to do everything else on the cheap and opted to stay in hostels. I’d heard great things about hostels and making all the friends. Somehow I managed to be really bad at doing the hostel thing and only really used the rooms to sleep and store my stuff, because activities. But here’s a roundup of the places I stayed at so you can pick your accommodations accordingly.
