Milford Sound helicopter flight: 90 minutes instead of 10 hours

The crossing. Out of Queenstown, over Lake Wakatipu, and then straight into mountains for forty-five minutes: glaciated peaks, hanging valleys, and country with no roads and no buildings at all. Most passengers say the crossing surprised them more than the fiord did.

The landings. Two on the Queenstown flight, on snow somewhere in the middle of the alps. Ten minutes with the engine off in a place you could not walk to in a week is the part that separates this from a sightseeing flight.

Milford itself. A fiord about fifteen kilometres long with walls that go straight into the water and Mitre Peak standing 1,692 metres directly out of it. If it has been raining — which it very often has, this is one of the wettest inhabited places on earth — the walls run with hundreds of temporary waterfalls.

Then back. A different line home, over more country nobody drives through.

This is four times the price of most of this page, so it deserves a straight answer.

It is worth it if you were not going to drive there. The road trip from Queenstown is ten hours of driving for a couple of hours at the fiord, and in bad weather the road can close. Ninety minutes in a helicopter with two alpine landings, and back for lunch, is a completely different day.

It is much less obviously worth it if Milford is already on your itinerary. If you are driving or coaching to the fiord anyway and taking a boat on it, the helicopter is showing you the same place from the air. In that case put the money into a glacier flight at Franz Josef or an alpine landing at Aoraki, both of which show you something the road cannot.

And read the evidence honestly. The Queenstown crossing carries fourteen reviews at 5.0. That is a real score on a small sample, not the 693-review certainty of the Franz Josef flight.