The views just keep getting better and better. I don’t understand how. NZ has definitely wrecked all walks and scenery in the future for us because we’ve been spoilt so rotten.

After Dunedin we headed over to Mt Cook, the tallest peak in NZ at 3724m.  Fortunately it’s not something you can walk up, but it has plenty of walks around it.  We camped in a simple but beautiful DOC (read: cheap) campsite and used it as a base for 2 or 3 walks, the main one taking us to a lake with actual icebergs in it! Small icebergs, but they count.

As you can see from the photos, the views are incredible.  The way the cloud rolled over the peaks and formed a roof over the mountains was something I’ve never seen before and created a really beautiful effect.

Desperately in need of a shower (they tend not to have them on DOC campsites) we then barrelled on to a town called Geraldine.  As you can see on our travel map we’ve been covering big distances each day in the last week, which has cost a fortune in fuel but we’ve packed a fair amount of walks in. There’s not a huge amount else to do around this neck of the woods to be honest, as significant towns are few and far between.

We had intended to use Geraldine as a base to go and do a significant day walk at another mountain, Mt Somner, but once we’d gotten there we discovered our guide book had massively undersold the nature of the hike; the path was steep, poorly formed, and slippy. The weather was crap and we quickly gave up and decided to backtrack to peel forest to try some easier walks.  Whilst these were perfectly nice, the weather was quickly turning and we were both a bit fed up.  After a quick google I managed to find a nice boutique cinema a couple of hours away in the ski town of Methven, and it turned out to be the release day of Spectre in NZ! Highly recommend it, possibly the best Bond yet.

We’re only a day or two from Christchurch now.  This morning we did a 4 hour walk at Rakaia Gorge, an incredible river with luminous blue waters that have cut out a huge chunk of the landscape.  Whilst being an enjoying and challenging walk, it was slightly marred when, at the big view at the end of the walk, a large bird of some sorts (“The bird equivalent of the Indominus Rex”) swooped down and stole Laura’s sunglasses from the top of her head! Laura is fortunately unhurt, but understandably angry at the bird (Laura: “I hope it chokes on the plastic.”)

For tomorrow, we have decided first to come and explore Arthurs Pass, one of the 3 routes over the mountains from East to West on the south island.  Surprise surprise; it has lots of walks, which we’ll embark on tomorrow. We’ve driven over to the West of the pass, and will head back East in the next day or two.  Arthurs Pass has to be one of the best roads we’ve driven on the whole trip though, with huge mountain ranges on either side looming over as you drive, along with some fun 16% gradient roads thrown in to test Vanatar’s prowess.

Wowzer, feels like it’s been ages since I wrote a post- speedy Sam keeps beating me to it.

After the Kepler track (so much steepness,) we took a bus to Milford Sound. This proved to be a great idea as we were so tired and in no mood for driving. Milford Sound was one of those places that every Kiwi we know had told us to visit- now we see why.

It’s so enormous and it makes you feel tiny and insignificant compared to how awesome nature is. Definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. Our boat was nice and small compared to the other huge cruise liner type things out on the water, and it was just generally a lovely day. Apparently it rains over 200 days a year out in Milford so even though it was overcast with a lot of low cloud, that was classed as awesome weather. Along the way, we stopped to do a few mini hikes and see stuff like this, Mirror Lakes:

The next day, we moved onto Invercargill. The less said about this, the better. The only thing it seems to have going for it is a PaknSave (think Aldi on a much bigger scale.) We quickly got out of there and headed to the Catlins Coast, somewhere we’d heard great things about, from people on the Kepler track. We drove along the southern scenic route (not actually that scenic) but found some lovely little hikes and things to see on the way.

We stayed at a campsite right next to a beach and were lucky enough to see a colony of sea lions sunbathing as we walked right past them. They were so well camouflaged we almost walked into one! Seals are becoming an everyday sighting now also- but STILL no dolphins or whales.

We think he’s called Ben.

From the Catlins, we carried onto Dunedin, NZ’s self proclaimed ‘Scottish city.’ I was imagining it to be a mini Edinburgh and in some respects it is-lots of gothic architecture and lovely shops- quite a few of them seemed heavily Scottish themed. The only down side about being in a city is that we end up spending far more than we should- this was no exception. Lots of coffees, a visit to Cadbury world (Sam had never been to the UK one) many margaritas, cinema etc all adds up massively. I managed to find an excellent hot yoga studio as well- yippee! After all of this spending, we thought we’d head out to the Otago Peninsula, about 45 mins from Dunedin. In such a small place, we’d be bound to save money, right? WRONG. “Ooh, look a castle- let’s go into the grounds- won’t cost that much. Ooh and there’s a penguin colony in a conservation site- let’s do the guided tour. Shall we get another coffee? How about a nice lunch somewhere?” So pricey. We need to lay off spending for a while.

The penguin tour was definitely worth the money though. Sam has been wanting to see penguins since we got here but it’s tricky to see them in their natural habitat. ‘Penguin Place’ is a family run conservation area, that’s working to encourage Yellow eyed penguins. There’s only around 3000 of them left in the world and you can only see them in certain areas of NZ. We were lucky enough to see quite a few today, as well as Blue eyed penguins nesting.

Meet Jim. He’s 22 and had three penguin wives. He can’t make up his mind.

With only 3 weeks left in the south island, we need to start getting a shifty on. This afternoon we’ll head up the east coast and then bounce back and forward between there and the central south. We hope to be in Christchurch in around 7-10 days. After that, it’s back upto Marlborough, but to the other side this time, to visit some more wineries. We’ll go to Kaikoura for a couple of days to hopefully to see whales, but with our luck so far, probably not. From the south island, we’ll head back to the north island and up to Martinbrough (more wine,) back to Taupo to do the Tongariro Alpine Crossing and then over to the Coromandel coast, hopefully with a stop in Hamilton to see a friend. From the Coromandel, it’ll be full steam ahead  back to Auckland to see my lovely friend Nicola for a few days, before we say bye bye to NZ and hop on over to Fiji for a month of sun, sea and diving.  So much to do, so little time to do it all!

Having already invested in all the gear needed for multi-day hikes we thought we would tick off another of NZ’s great walks. In Fiordland there are 3 available: The Milford, Routeburn and Kepler.  Milford track is the most popular, and it turns out the huts are booked up over a year in advance which ruled that out.  Routeburn currently has major avalanche risks, which would’ve required us to get helicoptered part of the way (at a not insignificant cost.) Which made our decision for us: we were going to walk the Kepler track!

The Kepler can be done in 2 or 3 nights; after the agony with our backpacks during the Abel Tasman Coastal Track we decided to do it in 2 nights; more walking but with less to carry.  Laura managed to get all of her stuff into a daypack thanks to some impressive MacGuyvering of cables and carabiners.  This meant we had a lot of walking to do on the last day, but it looked feasible as it was mostly flat on day 3, unlike the first two days.

Our plan was to stay at Luxmore hut on the first night (after climbing nearly 1000m), Iris Burn on the second night (after decending another 800m or so) then make it to Rainbow Reach on the final day (where we were picked up by a shuttle bus.)

One of the reasons this track is meant to be so wonderful is the diversity of the nature on show and it really did deliver.  The route was part forest, part tundra, part alpine hills (snow!) and even a beach in there at one point.  For me personally it was even more amazing than the Abel Tasman and some of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen.  I don’t think walking will be the same again for me anywhere else.

The climb on the first day was surprisingly not too bad; the inclines weren’t too steep and our bags were mercifully light in comparison which meant we made it to the hut by 3 in the afternoon in quite a good condition.  This is one of the most beautiful huts in NZ and we were treated to epic views like this:

The hut even has a permanent ranger, who gave us a one hour nature tour and a guide to the stars- with zero light pollution and no moon the stars were really clear and you could even make out the Milky Way.

We made one mistake though.  Having seen the profile we’d assumed most of the climbing was done and it was mostly downhill, so we ate all of our chocolate (the only treat we’d brought.)  Turned out that was a massive error, as day 2 had a gruelling climb to the summit, followed by an incredibly sharp descent that was even more painful than going up the mountain!

Despite the pain, the views on the second day were truly second to none, looking down over Lake Te Anau and over to alpine mountains on all sides.

The final day was 7 hours of downhill, which we managed to knock out in under 5.  Although it was easy walking, by this point both of our feet were killing (my shoes are slightly too small so my toes hurt, and Laura had blisters) and we were exhausted thanks to someone in the bunk room who snored like an elephant so we were just desperate for it to be over.  You can see how happy we are at the end.

Having sped pretty quickly down the West Coast it was then necessary to cut inland to the Otago region; it’s just the way the road goes.  This generally means heading to Queenstown, the extreme sports/gap year student drinking headquarters of NZ.  We were both somewhat reluctant to rush there, seeing as we like to be in bed for half 9 and it’s meant to be geared towards late night party goers, so we decided to call into Wanaka.  We didn’t know anything about the place, and no one had recommended it, but it was in the book so we thought we’d pop through and see if there was much to see or do.

I don’t think it’s possible to capture it perfectly in a photo, but this place is absolutely beautiful.  Sat next to Lake Wanaka, there’s literally nowhere  you can turn where you won’t get a beautiful view of the lake and/or mountains.  It’s also has plenty of restaurants/cafes/bars, 2 cinemas and “Puzzling world”.  We ended up staying for 4 days!

On arrival we went straight to Puzzling world (I think Laura felt guilty we still haven’t had the curry I was promised after our 5 day hike), which is made up of 2 main sections. The first is The Illusion Rooms, which had a series of, well, illusions to marvel at.  Sounds a bit cheesy but they were really quite good. In one section, the entire room had been tilted up at an angle of about 20 degrees.  This completely freaks the mind out and it’s really hard to balance- I have a new found appreciation for the actors in Inception.  In another, using a well placed camera and an optical illusion from a checkerboard floor, it made us look like one of us was a giant and the other tiny (a technique apparently used in Lord or the Rings).  There was also a whole bunch of other stuff which was quite entertaining.

The second section is the Great Maze; a big maze where you need to reach the 4 corners in order before heading to the finish. Completion time was 30-60 minutes, and we came in at a respectable 45 minutes.  I absolutely loved it, having never been in a giant maze before and I think I have quite a knack for it; Laura may disagree though.

On our first full day in Wanaka, we did what we do best; we walked.  For 5 hours.  Fortunately, this was a Sam style route, completely flat and well marked.  The view was incredible throughout as we walked around part of the lake, with an always shifting backdrop of snow covered mountains.  The route also took us past some incredible holiday homes which looked like they could’ve been on grand designs, bringing much envy from us.

Wanaka is also home to a winery (with free tastings) so after having a picnic by the lake and getting sunburnt we headed up to what has to be my favourite view in all of our trip so far.  A lovely place to taste 7 or so wines and have a glass of Riesling.

I’m pretty sure we both could’ve spent another couple of days easily in Wanaka (we didn’t even get to explore the “transport & toys” museum) but there’s only 7 weeks to go in NZ and we’ve got so much to do so we reluctantly headed on to Queenstown.

I think because we both went in with low expectations Queenstown wasn’t actually that bad.  It’s very commercial and quite pricey (for the public holiday all the restaurants put their prices up 15%. What’s that about?) and nowhere near as pretty as Wanaka, but it was nice to be in a big town for a brief change.  We only hung around for a night due to how much more expensive the campsite is, plus there’s much nicer places to explore.  We’re off cycling tomorrow (possibly around more wineries), and we’re planning to do another one of the great walks in the next week which is a short drive away.  There’s really no resting on this “holiday”!

If I had to use two words to describe the west coast, I would have to say: wet. windy.

We (reluctantly) left Marlborough and drove to Golden Bay, which was actually quite strange- there’s only one very windy road around a mountain in and out so you feel very isolated. Then you arrive in Tanaka, which felt like a hippie colony- good coffee though. We drove to the Farewell Spit, the most northern point on the south island. Very beautiful and cute seals on the beaches but it was SO windy. The photo doesn’t really do it justice:From here, we headed down the west coast to a teeny tiny village called Punakaiki, stopping at a few campsites along the way. There’s not a lot to do in places like this, apart from hiking and the scenery was so pretty that I don’t think Sam minded too much (especially with the promise of hot chocolate and marshmallows at the end of it!) We’ve gotten into the habit of stopping for coffee or hot choc everyday- so much so that Sam has created a separate category in our budget app. I don’t want to know how much we’ve spent on it so far- definitely more on coffee than on booze!

We’ve now reached the awesome glaciers- Franz Josef and Fox. WOW. Although the weather hasn’t been great and so we haven’t been able to get as close to them as we’d like, they’re still hugely impressive. Fun fact for you- the glaciers are retreating due to global warming and so the DOC needs to constantly change the access points for the public. The only way to get onto the glacier is by guided hike via  a helicopter. We looked into it but it was going to be more expensive than skydiving- Sam put his foot down firmly on this one.

Low cloud cover- but this is a glacier, honest.

Man flu has struck Vanatar this week- Sam has been ill, which has been SO FUN for me! No, it’s actually been ok, although patience has been wearing thin for both of us! He’s rallied though and come on hikes with me everyday even though he’s felt rubbish- massive husband points for him.

The west coast is notorious for its rainfall and this proved no exception yesterday- 24 hours of solid heavy rain. Seriously heavy rain. To the point where pretty much leaving Vanatar to go to the toilets resulted in needing to change clothes. It’s really interesting in how different countries deal with wet weather- in HK, it would’ve been declared black rain, everything would have come to a standstill (school would’ve been cancelled for sure.) In London, buses would’ve been gridlocked, tubes with massive delays. In NZ, everyone just deals with it- normal life goes on.

Tomorrow, we’re heading in land to the Central Otago region- more wineries, woohoo! Next week we’re also planning to do another great walk- weather dependant. Sam’s counting down the minutes.

Sam’s Skydive:

Laura’s Skydive:

Gallery: