for Jewellery. It is so prized that the export of it is illegal, and it can fetch up to $100,000 a tonne. It seems that even the mud on the road around here is green!! There was an awful lot of rain that night, and it wasn’t too warm either, to say the least!! So we feasted on a hearty lentil and barley stew, got an early night, and hoped that the DOC’s prediction that the weather would improve the next day was right!!

The morning brought some slight improvement to start with, in that we could see a little further up the mountains, to reveal the snow not too high above where we were - which explained the cold pretty well!! But that soon gave way to more torrential rain. Still, we had faith in the weather forecast - (They seem to be a little more reliable than at home!!), and we set off back to Milford road to make the final leg to Milford Sound, including the Homer tunnel, the biggest

engineering challenge of the Milford Road. The tunnel is 1200 meters long, and took thirty years to dig through the solid rock, albeit with a four year break when the project was abandoned as “too difficult”. The gradient is one in ten downhill, and the tunnel only allows traffic through in one direction, with traffic lights at each end which take fifteen minutes to change. It is also the roughest tunnel I’ve ever been in - more reminiscent of a cave really!! Coming out of the other side however, the setting is absolutely breathtaking - the wall of rock that you emerge from is unfeasibly huge - and in the rain that we drove through had the maddest green hue with literally dozens of torrents of water gushing down it. A series of hairpins wind down the valley where at the bottom we stopped off to take a look at “The Chasm”, where the powerful, stone laden river has gouged out a series of mind boggling shapes in the rock. From there it was a short drive down to Milford, and after a brief look at the