If Franz Josef Glacier is my absolute highlight of New Zealand, Milford Sound is a close second. It’s located in Fiordland National Park and boasts dramatic rock monuments towering over a waterway. It’s spectacular.

It rains here approximately 180 days out of the year… if you’re doing the math, that’s nearly 50% of the time. Our bus driver insists it’s actually better in rainy weather because hundreds of waterfalls sprout on the cliffs, but I think he’s just trying to prepare us for bad weather because the forecast is terrible. So imagine our surprise when we arrive to this:

Nature flipped a coin and “sunny with blue skies” must have come up, because the weather is pretty perfect. Lucky us!

We board the boat for our two hour tour.

We pass by dozens of waterfalls, a handful of which are BIG.

We’ll get up close and personal with that waterfall in the distance near the end of our tour.

The first of many rainbows we’ll see today:

See the whitecaps on the waves below? The wind here is incredibly powerful. There’s video footage at the end of this post to prove it.

Those of us on the upper and lower decks get fairly soaked.

And now for footage from the cruise. I left the natural sound in (but lowered it considerably) to show how intense the wind is.

… and that is why Milford Sound is a must-visit spot for any New Zealand itinerary.