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WONDERS OF NATURE
Fiordland. Nature miracle
The extreme southwest of the South Island of New Zealand has long been called the Fiordland - the Land of the Fjords. The nature here is strikingly different from the hilly plateaus of the North Island, above which only in some places low cones of young volcanoes rise. The South Island is predominantly a mountainous country, the backbone of which is the mighty chain of the Southern Alps, which raises its snowy peaks almost four kilometers high.
The huge glacier that once covered this area carved deep trough-shaped gorges in the slopes of the ridge, in which a dozen and a half long narrow long lakes and at least thirty deep fjord bays were formed, which gave the name to this picturesque corner of the country. Nature has generously endowed New Zealand with beauty, but the landscapes of the Fiordland are the most beautiful that can be seen in this fabulous land, and perhaps on our entire planet. The traveler who got here is speechless at the first moment when the ship enters a calm bay surrounded by kilometer walls of rocks and takes a course inland, to where the snows turn white on the slopes of the Southern Alps. And the further the ship sails, the longer you get acquainted with the amazing and diverse nature of the Fiordland, the more you are amazed at the magical beauty of the surrounding places. And it is difficult to decide what is the most picturesque, most interesting, most majestic and most exciting in this wild and deserted country: bays or mountains, forests or waterfalls, lakes or glaciers, rare, endangered birds or the longest mosses in the world ... Descending from the mountains twenty thousand years ago, giant glacial tongues cut through the rocky shores of the South Island, sometimes going fifty kilometers deep, winding fjords, into which three hundred meter waterfalls fall from steep cliffs. And located in the vicinity of the Milford Sound fjord, the Sutherland waterfall, whose height reaches almost six hundred meters, is one of the five highest on our planet. From the equally beautiful fjords of Norway or Southern Chile, the New Zealand bays compare favorably with the complete absence of traces of human activity. Their shores go so steeply into the water that it is not easy to find a place on them not only for a village, but simply for a tourist tent. The second characteristic feature of the Fiordland is the unusually close proximity of the forests of its coast to mountain glaciers. Nowhere else on Earth do rivers of ice descend directly to the edge of moist evergreen forests. The combination of a bluish, fissured half-kilometer thickness of the glacier with thickets of myrtle, southern beech and laurel fringing its foot strikes everyone who sees it for the first time. Meanwhile, the apparent improbability of this picture is easily explained. Due to the steepness of the western "façade" of the Southern Alps, New Zealand glaciers move much faster than their counterparts anywhere in the Pyrenees or the Himalayas. Some of them, such as the Tasman Glacier, move down half a meter daily. Before melting, the tongue of the glacier has time to descend sometimes to a height of three hundred meters above sea level. And the upper limit of forests at this latitude reaches a thousand meters. As a result, ice and tropical forests meet each other, ignoring "intermediaries" like alpine meadows or mountain tundra. Even more beautiful are the numerous mountain lakes of the Southern Alps. Narrow, long and compressed by rocky slopes rising one and a half to two kilometers above their blue waters, they are somewhat reminiscent of the reservoirs of the Taimyr Putorana Plateau in Siberia. But, of course, the forests surrounding the lakes of Te Anau, Waikatipu, Wanaka, Ohau or Rakaia are immeasurably richer, denser, taller and more luxurious than the Putorana larch woodlands. The valleys in the depths of the mountainous regions are practically uninhabited. In many places in the Fiordland, no human foot has yet set foot. And each new expedition discovers here previously unknown peaks, waterfalls, lakes and passes. The longest lake in New Zealand - Waikatipu - stretches from northwest to southeast for almost a hundred kilometers, cutting through the ridge with a blue transverse zigzag. Its depth reaches four hundred meters. So many rivers flow into Waikatipu, which, for lack of population, did not have local names, that topographers preferred not to exercise their imagination, but to mark them on the map simply by serial numbers: from First to Twenty-Fifth. A mysterious natural phenomenon is associated with this lake, the explanation of which science has not yet found. The water in it every five minutes rises by seven and a half centimeters, then drops to the previous level. The lake is breathing. New Zealanders like to say that the heart of the South Island beats under the waters of Waikatipu. And here is how the ancient Maori legend explains the mystery of Lake Waikatipu: “A long time ago,” it says, “there lived in one of the valleys of the island the daughter of the leader Manat and the brave young hunter and warrior Matakauri. A young man and a girl fell in love with each other, but trouble happened - the evil giant Matau attacked their village and took Manatu to his possessions, far into the depths of the snowy mountains.In desperation, the old leader, the girl's father, turned to all the warriors of the tribe, begging them to save his daughter.To the one who saves the girl, he promised to give her to wives. None of the men dared to fight the giant, and only Matakauri ventured into this desperate undertaking. The young daredevil climbed high into the mountains and found a sleeping giant there, and next to him - Manat tied to a tree. Having freed his beloved, he went down with her to the village, but did not stay there with the girl, but again returned to the mountains. After all, it was clear that, having woken up, the evil giant would again descend into the valley and deal with the kidnapper, and carry the girl back. And Matakauri decided to destroy the giant. While he slept with his head on one mountain and his feet on the other two, the young man began to drag armfuls of brushwood, twigs and logs from the forest and surround the sleeping giant with them. Matakauri worked for many days and nights. Then, rubbing two pieces of wood against each other, he made a fire and lit a fire. The flame engulfed the giant, and the smoke covered the sun. The heat from the huge fire was so strong that the flames burned the ground. A giant depression formed, resembling the outlines of the body of a giant. Rains and mountain rivers filled it with water and turned it into a lake, which people called Waikatipu. And only the giant's heart did not burn. It lies deep at the bottom of the lake and is still beating. And with each of his blows, the lake waters either rise or fall ... " Over the past decades, so many rare birds have been discovered in the remote corners of the Fjord Country that the country's authorities decided to create a national park with an area of one million two hundred thousand hectares in this part of the island! (Its territory is larger than the territory of Lebanon or Cyprus.) In the forests of the Fiordland Park, you can meet the rarest owl parrot, the kakapo, which lives in earthen holes and feeds on snails and worms, or the huge and unusual in its habits kea predator parrot, capable, like an African vulture, butchering the carcasses of fallen sheep, leaving only skeletons from them. Kea was practically exterminated in other places in New Zealand, as cattle farmers believed that he could sit on the backs of sheep and pull out pieces of meat directly from living animals, and therefore they ruthlessly destroyed a beautiful bird, which, by the way, tasted meat for the first time only after the appearance of Europeans . Indeed, before that, there were no mammals in New Zealand at all, except for bats, and only English settlers taught the kea to an unusual type of food. The fact is that before the invention of reefer ships, New Zealanders sent only sheep's wool to England, and the carcasses were thrown away. And then, around the slaughterhouses, there was enough food for a well-fed existence for more than a dozen winged "orderlies". However, most zoologists categorically reject the accusation of attacks on live sheep. The most beautiful emerald parrot, the vociferous thuja bird and the generally recognized best singer of mountain forests, prosaically called the yellow crow, are also found in the mountain thickets of Fiordland. And in 1948, on the shores of Lake Te Anau, amateur naturalist Orbell discovered the long-extinct takahe bird, which was the largest ornithological discovery of the XNUMXth century. Takahe is a flightless bird about the size of a large goose. It is distinguished by bright, beautiful plumage, strong legs and a short thick beak of bright red color. Once upon a time, before the arrival of Europeans, there were so many takahe in the South Island that the entire western coast of the Maori was called "the place where the takahe live." For settlers from England, game unable to fly away became easy prey, and already at the end of the XNUMXth century, hunters stopped meeting takahe. It was believed that they were completely exterminated, but after more than half a century it turned out that several pairs of unique birds found shelter on the shores of a remote mountain lake. Now their habitat is under strict protection, and the rare bird species seems to have been saved from extinction. Some optimistic zoologists believe that in the impregnable corners of the Fiordland, gigantic moa birds, three-meter giants of the New Zealand fauna, could have survived to this day. Disappeared several centuries ago, they were the largest birds on Earth, along with the now extinct inhabitant of Madagascar, the giant epiornis ostrich. Alas, the hopes of optimists are most likely groundless. So far no traces of the moa have been found. And on the highways of the southern part of the island, you can often see an unusual road sign depicting a penguin enclosed in a red circle. So the road service warns about the crossing points of yellow-eyed penguins - small cute birds, completely different in their way of life from their polar counterparts. They make their nests in the forest, a few kilometers from the coast, and every day they slowly walk to the sea, where they get food for themselves and their offspring. From Dunedin, the southernmost major city in New Zealand, the Land of the Fjords can be reached both by land and by sea. The most popular of the bays of Fiordland - Milford Sound - leads from Lake Waikatipu through a narrow road through an amazingly beautiful gorge. The New Zealanders have nicknamed this path the "Wonder Trail". The very same lake covered with legends is connected with the inhabited areas of the eastern coast by an old tract, once laid by gold miners. At one time, Waikatipu experienced a period of "gold rush", when tent cities and gold mines arose on its banks like mushrooms. But the reserves of the precious metal soon ran out, and now only this old road reminds of the old days. No less interesting, and even more accessible for tourists unprepared for mountain trekking, is traveling through the fjords by boat. Such a voyage will allow you, regardless of the weather (which is replete with rain and fog), to enjoy the fantastic landscapes of the Land of Fjords and, in particular, to visit Dusky Sound, hidden behind the mountainous Resolution Island, where more than two centuries ago the camp of the Cook expedition, which compiled the first map of the coast, was located Fiordland He also named the island, which protects the hospitable and picturesque bay from autumn storms, after his ship "Resolution". And a hundred miles to the north crashes forty kilometers into the coast, the main attraction of Fiordland - the famous Milford Sound. And when the ship passes Mount Miter, which guards the entrance to it, which has raised its peak seventeen hundred meters above the sea, and finds itself surrounded by steep wooded slopes of the coastal ridges, the traveler begins to think that he is swimming in a fairy tale. Now the blue, now the emerald waters of the fjord are not stirred by the slightest breeze. From the green thickets comes the gentle voice of the thuja bird. Ahead, at the turn of the bay, a long foamy ribbon of a waterfall shines silver, and even further, in the very depths, the snowy peaks of the Humboldt Mountains rise, behind which lies the mysterious and alluring Lake Waikatipu. At the foot of the mountains, the only settlement on the entire coast of the National Park hid - the tourist base of Milford Sound, from where the picturesque path will lead the traveler to the amazing and grandiose miracle of the nature of the Southern Alps - the crazy jump of the mighty river from the black cliff, called Sutherland Falls. From it, a simple pass leads the tourist to the shores of the spacious and deep lake Te Anau, the home of the clumsy red-billed takakhe, fortunately not extinct, the pearl of the bird kingdom. The further path will lead to the "Wonder Trail" lying just to the north, along which you can return to Milford Sound. But the impression of the South Island will be incomplete if you do not continue your journey beyond the northern border of Fiordland - to the Westland fjords, located at the foot of New Zealand's highest peak, Mount Cook. The stunning scenery that opens up to the human eye here can be roughly described as a Swiss view in the Mont Blanc region with the coastal landscape of Norway in the foreground. This is a real symphony of shapes and colors of the sea, jungle, snow, ice and stone.
Of course, you can really feel the enchanting and even poignant beauty of this mountain landscape only by walking along the steeps and ice of the Southern Alps. In addition, a breathtaking journey along the bluish-white slopes of the Franz Josef Glacier, reaching almost six hundred meters in thickness, will make the traveler experience a lot of thrills when crossing cracks on snowy bridges and descents from almost sheer icefalls. Author: B.Wagner
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