Living in Milford Sound

Currently I am living in a temperate rainforest in the Southland of New Zealand called Fiordland National park. More specifically Milford Sound witch is a one of the many Fiords along the west cost of Southland. A Fiord is a glassier carved valley that is back flooded by the sea, leaving extreme dramatic mountains. Because it is a temperate rainforest we get thousands of temporary waterfalls that can show up within 30 minutes of the first rainfall and will dry up within a couple of hours after the rain has stopped. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. We have two permeant glassier melt waterfalls that provide our village with water. Sadly they predicted to dry up with in the next 30+ years.

Our village was about 250-300 people before massive flooding came through Milford and we were put into a sate of emergence (you can find that story on my YouTube Wednesday) now we are about 30 people after redundancies. In this little village there is accommodation for those who work here, a cafe run by one of the companies, as well as a small hotel that will cost you a minimum of $600 a night. No supermarkets, no stores, not much at all besides us and nature. Meaning we need to leave on our days off and go get supplies example: food, snacks, chocolate. All the essentials.

My job title is ‘boat crew’ on a tour boat that takes people around the fiord. That entails cleaning the boat, chatting with customers, making food and basically anything the captain asks us to do. We are also trained for emergence circumstance as we are cruising in the sea and anything could go wrong even though it is a reasonably safe environment. So far nothing too bad has happened only the rare engine or steering problems. 

Over the past 10 months I’ve had the pleasure of working and living in such beautiful place. Living in a National Park is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done but it does come with down sides. We are two hours from the closes town and we have zero cell service and very limited wifi. Just enough to be able to send a message to the fam saying you haven’t died of doing something stupidly dangerous, yet. However, that creates a culture that is hard to find in todays world. Everyone is engaged when talking to each other and runs around doing whatever dumb thing comes to mind. Much like when you were a kid because there is no internet to distract from human contact. That has to be one of my favorite things about living so off grid, along with the insane nature all around. 

I wanted to give a little overview of where we live, what we do, and a little bit of an idea of what we do for fun because I often get the question “umm.. so what do you do there?”. It is not very detailed but if there are more questions I’m happy to answer, just commit below.