Fiordland: Wandering in the wilderness

The Milford Wanderer at Dusky Sound. Photo / Jim Eagles

This is Southern Ocean beauty. We gaze out at open sea in one direction, and a rugged uninhabited shore, swathed in mist and spray in the other. Wandering albatross, mollymawks and Cape pigeons sweep back and forth close to the boat. In the distance, we can see the spout of a whale.

We are mesmerised by the wandering albatross.

They glide low, with huge, dropping wings, over the crests of the waves, their heavy, white bodies standing out against the grey sea.

Along with 32 fellow passengers and seven crew, we're aboard the Milford Wanderer for a week on a Discovery Cruise, exploring New Zealand's most remote and untouched area - Dusky Sound and Chalky and Preservation Inlets in Fiordland.

The boat is clean and comfortable without being luxurious. Slung off the back of the boat is a robust-looking craft with an enormous outboard motor for trips ashore.

With only a few seven-day cruises during winter, the Milford Wanderer trip is not heavily promoted. The operators target mainly outdoor types from the south but there are a few North Islanders on our trip, along with an emergency department doctor from Australia, which is reassuring, given our isolation.

Our fellow passengers are farmers, artists, engineers, scientists and owner-operators of tourism and other businesses. The collective knowledge about New Zealand native plants and birds is high and it is lucky the crew includes a couple of expert nature guides able to answer questions.

It is hard to get to the area and I'm keen to see what the fiords look and feel like.

As we set out, I expect dark still water, brooding valleys, endless forest, sandflies, rain and more rain. I'm not disappointed.

Despite doing some reading, I'm unprepared for how captivating the stories and history about this remote area are.

In 1773, Captain Cook spent five weeks in Dusky Sound, on board the Resolution, which he had moored up against a bank in a tiny protected bay he named Pickersgill Harbour. They used a rata tree to create a permanent gangway to the shore.

The harbour was the first landfall for Captain Cook and his crew after four months at sea - a voyage that included a sweep down into Antarctic waters between the Cape of Good Hope and New Zealand.

Their stay in Dusky Sound allowed the crew to take on food and water, and to rest. They also explored and accurately mapped the area by longboat.

Captain Cook also fixed the location of the land mass of New Zealand on the world map. From a cleared area Cook named Astronomers Point, their position was calculated with great accuracy.

The area looks exactly as it would have in Cook's time, despite periods of bustling European settler activity, including sealing, whaling, gold prospecting and smelting. Few signs of human history remain.

My father, Allan Cookson, first went to Fiordland in 1937 as a deer culler. On his first four-month trip, he and his shooting partner shot about 600 deer.

Dad visited different parts of Fiordland during the following 15 or so years. His trips included Canterbury Museum-sponsored Takahe expeditions and private climbing trips. Fiordland was mainly untouched and unknown, and this fascinated him.

Maps were produced from surveys made from the sea. They included coastlines and high points but had no topographic lines and also left out lakes, rivers and passes. The land on the map was white, with "UNEXPLORED" written across it.

Most of these lakes and routes were familiar to Maori, who used them for access to greenstone, for refuge when fleeing conflict and as a rich source of food. Tarns were thick with eels, and birds were tame enough to trap easily.

From the 1960s, others continued this exploration of Fiordland, learning its forgotten history. The Begg brothers and John Hall-Jones wrote the books we used as background reading for our trip. However, these people weren't your average historians. Campsites can be deluged with 24 inches of rain in 24 hours, and the main qualifications for studying the history of Fiordland is to enjoy living in the bush for weeks and to have small boat-handling skills.

The introduced wildlife to the area was studied extensively by Ken Tustin, one of the nature guides on the Milford Wanderer. Since the early 1990s, he's spent a month a year in bush camps in Dusky Sound, mostly accompanied by his wife, Marg.

Fellow passengers said the extraordinary thing about his research was not his results, but that Marg joined him on the camps.

We spent our week more comfortably than Ken and Marg did during their camps but it was the same weather and the same bush. We had trips ashore, walks in the bush and a kayaking expedition. One day we walked to Puysegur Lighthouse, which guards the entrance to Foveaux Strait.

The week finished with a breathtaking helicopter trip to our start point at Manapouri.

Jane Lenting travelled to Fiordland with Real Journeys.