This post follows up my two earlier posts about the wild Catlins region of New Zealand. I went through in a campervan at the start of June 2021. I visit the waterfalls, and list freedom camping sites. Information about freedom camping sites can be a bit hard to come by, so I have made the effort to identify all five such sites in the Catlins. I als…

THE Lake Marian Track has lately become very popular, although tourist numbers are down at present because of Covid (so, if in NZ already, you should go there!). The track begins from Marian Carpark, one kilometre down the unsealed Hollyford Road from its intersection with the Milford Road, some ninety kilometres out from Te Anau. It now has a wood…

The Taranaki (NZ) Around the Mountain Circuit turned into an epic for me! I only got halfway before falling into a ravine on the way north and injuring myself, so the northern side will have to be written up some other time. But meanwhile, here are some thoughts on doing the southern side. Which is what you miss out if, like a lot of people, you on…

Reefton, on the West Coast of NZ’s South Island, was one of the first towns to get electric light and is the gateway to many trails today. It is the only sizable town on the West Coast that’s some way inland. The town got its start in 1871 following the discovery of a gold reef nearby, and was originally called Reef Town. To this day it’s got plent…

Hanmer Springs is a popular hot-spring resort east of the Lewis Pass in NZ’s South Island. It’s also the gateway to a wilderness. You get to Hanmer Springs by turning northward, off State Highway 7 between the Lewis Pass and Culverden. The town lies in a small plain just south of the Hanmer Range, which includes Mount Isobel and Jacks Pass. It’s a …

That’s a question we need to ask in New Zealand. Should immigration targets be linked to positive spending on infrastructure and housing to cope? On last Sunday’s Q+A, most of the panel and the interviewees seemed to think that New Zealand needed a larger population, built up by immigration. Or that immigration-fuelled growth was, at any rate, inev…

THE PAPAROA TRACK is New Zealand’s most recently-commissioned Great Walk. The track partly follows an old gold-miners’ pathway with the hopeful name of the Croesus Track. And it partly also follows a brand-new course, including the epic gorge of the Pororari River. This part of New Zealand is probably the southernmost place on earth where you will …

THE population heartland of the South Island’s West Coast lies in the area around Greymouth and Westport, where mines in the hills are joined with a comparative abundance of flat land by West Coast standards. The plain sits west of the South Island’s gigantic Alpine Fault: a crack in the earth’s crust that runs southwest like a ruler to Fiordland, …

Visitor numbers are up in the limestone country near Karamea, New Zealand. Which is a good thing, as it’s really worth a visit! Things to see include the incredible Ōpārara arches and Mirror Tarn, accessible from a road built by loggers decades ago when logging was still allowed. Starting out from Westport, the first place you’ll want to make a tur…

The two ends of the Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand’s ten Great Walks. are far apart. But flying back over the top is just as amazing! I’ve done the Heaphy a couple of times from the eastern end. So, this time (March 2021) I decided to go from the west, for a change, and also because I was on the West Coast already. I hastily booked a flight with …

This post takes a closer look at the New Zealand state’s longstanding historical unwillingness to make plans for Auckland’s growth. A COUPLE of weeks ago we blogged about “the paradox of retrenchment in the face of growth.” We wrote about how it was practically an orthodoxy some forty years ago that the populations of Auckland, and of a New Zealand…

Auckland Council, New Zealand’s so-called Super City administration, has become known for at least four areas of failure in a decade. Why? It’s time to question the approach of chief executives such as Jim Stabback and his predecessor Stephen Town, and their sub-chiefs in Auckland Transport, Ports of Auckland and Watercare, which all too often focu…

It was my amazing luck to hike the Banks Track at the end of January, 2021. It’s on the ‘wild side’ of the rocky, volcanic Banks Peninsula. Billed on its website as New Zealand’s “original private walking track,” the Banks Track invites you to spend three nights on the remote south-eastern tip of Te Horomaka or Banks Peninsula, also known in Māori …

AFTER my month on Rakiura/Stewart Island, I left for Whenua Hou, also known as Codfish Island, to work on track maintenance. Even in normal times, to stay on the island you have to go through quarantine, which I did in Invercargill. During the process, they checked for foreign grasses in my gear,so I had made sure to purchase new socks and wash dow…

THE small size of Oban belies its importance as Stewart Island’s only town and the entranceway to the North West Circuit Track where I was to be spending a few weeks volunteering as a hut warden, and also to the much shorter Rakiura Track, the southernmost of New Zealand’s official Great Walks. The Māori name for Stewart Island is Rakiura, which me…

Christchurch, New Zealand, has some amazing Lord of the Rings country to its north & west. You don’t have to go far from town to get there! Looking at just one of these areas, the Hakatere Conservation Park, it's close to Erewhon, the setting of the English writer Samuel Butler’s fictional utopia Erewhon,but also an actual place. This district incl…

Banks Peninsula (near Christchurch NZ) is an eroded volcano with several harbours, historic ports, wildlife, and lots of hiking trails. In its topography it resembles one of the Hawai‘ian islands, though naturally somewhat colder and bleaker. The biggest harbours on the peninsula are Lyttelton Harbour just south of Christchurch and Akaroa Harbour f…

BETWEEN Blenheim and Nelson, there is a ruggedly beautiful area that extends from the Marlborough Sounds in the north-east to Nelson Lakes National Park, in the southwest, via the Richmond Range. To the west, and south, of this great triangular block of mountains there are the river flats and plains of Nelson and, on the Blenheim side, the Wairau v…

NELSON is a lovely, leafy city at the top end of the South Island of New Zealand. It has a sunny climate, lots of old buildings both in wood and stone, and a frankly amazing abundance of hiking trails in the hills that overlook the town.‍ The locality on which Nelson was established is known in Māori as Wakatu or Whakatū: names that look and sound …

With an abundance of gothic stone architecture and a large pedestrian area, Christchurch, New Zealand, is like a quaint old city in Europe. Indeed, I never get sick of visiting the thriving metropolis of Christchurch, or Ōtautahi, which is in fact now the largest city in the South Island, its current population about 420,000 overall. Much of its he…

Kaikōura is a major whale-watching destination, between Blenheim and Christchurch on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The town sits just to the landward side of a deep submarine trench, whose chilly uplifting waters nourish large populations of crayfish, the namesakes of Kaikōura, which means ‘eat crayfish’ in Māori. The town is also j…

IT’S something of a cliché, in New Zealand’s South Island, that Christchurch is ‘English’ and Dunedin ‘Scottish’. Indeed, for a long time, the different national origins of early settler communities, including a significant number of Chinese gold miners, entirely overshadowed the fact that Māori also inhabited the South Island for some seven or eig…

KAHURANGI National Park, which occupies a vast area west of Motueka, is the second largest national park in New Zealand after Fiordland. With over five hundred and seventy kilometres of tracks, including the famous seventy-eight-kilometre Heaphy Track which I write about in another post, Kahurangi is tramping heaven. With its coastal palm forests, …

The Tūātapere Hump Ridge Track, soon to become New Zealand’s newest Great Walk, gives great views of the setting sun past rock outcrops. A three-day loop track along the south coast of New Zealand, the Hump Ridge Track (for short) covers fifty-five kilometres of beaches, forests and subalpine terrain. Near the town of Tūātapere, west of Invercargil…

THE Kepler Track begins on the shores of Lake Te Anau — the largest body of fresh water in the South Island of New Zealand — and winds its way through the spectacular Fiordland National Park.‍ Looping for some sixty kilometres up alpine heights and alongside two beautiful lakes, the track starts and ends only five kilometres from the town of Te Ana…

A MODERATELY demanding tramp winds its way through the beautiful Caples and Greenstone Valleys, which come together by the shore of Lake Wakatipu and are also joined, in the hills, by the subalpine pass of McKellar Saddle, which offers incredible views of the surrounding landscape. There is plenty of native wildlife on the track, and when I first d…

BETWEEN Queenstown, where I live, and Dunedin, there’s an aridly picturesque region called Central Otago. Central Otago is a rain-shadow region, kept dry by the blocking effect of the high mountains around Queenstown. It looks a lot like Outback Australia or parts of the Middle East that I’ve been to. Some call it a desert, though there are a few t…

PARTICULARLY SCENIC is the section of highway that leads from Haast to Lake Wānaka, and ultimately to the town at the southern end of the lake, via the Haast Pass/Tiorepatea. Historically, this was an important route for Māori pounamu (greenstone) prospectors, as the top of the pass is only 562 m or 1,844 feet above sea level. This makes it the low…

French Ridge is one of several mountaineering and hiking destinations at the head of the Matukituki Valley, west of Wānaka, New Zealand. MY tramp up to French Ridge Hut was quite difficult, as the track was coated with spiny plants native to New Zealand called speargrass, which gets very slippery underfoot when it snows. The track was also filled w…

The Matukituki Valley, west of Lake Wānaka, is a must-visit for anyone in the Queenstown region of the South Island of New Zealand. "We began our tramp into the Matukituki Valley, which is common up to a point where it branches into the East and West Matukituki Valleys, from the Raspberry Creek Carpark, an hour’s drive up from Wānaka and a short di…

FIRST, take a cruise on the 1912-vintage Lake steamer TSS Earnslaw to Walter Peak Station for lunch and a tour of the farm park, or, better still,for dinner on a long summer evening.‍ TSS is short for Twin Screw Steamer: it means that the vessel has two propellors (‘screws’) and that it is, indeed, powered by steam. I’ve got a blog post about the E…

QUEENSTOWN is nearly two hours south of Auckland by jet, two hours that make a difference. Auckland has palm trees and looks like Fiji. Surrounded by mountains that are often snowy on top, Queenstown looks more like somewhere in Norway or Switzerland. The town is on a long lake called Lake Wakatipu, which stretches 80 km or 50 miles from Kingston a…

New Zealand’s highest peak, Aoraki/Mount Cook, lies at the heart of a national park that supports mountaineering, hiking and cycle tours. Things to do range from dangerous mountaineering opportunities to simple,scenic daywalks and the start of the Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail, which goes all the way down to Oamaru. Mount Cook Village, at the foot of Ao…

There’s heaps to do in Arthur’s Pass, the busiest pass between Christchurch and the West Coast in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Arthur's Pass is the most commercially important alpine pass in the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island. It’s certainly the only one with a regular train service, stopping at a rather Swiss-style mountain statio…

ONE of my favourite parts of New Zealand is the Lewis Pass / Maruia Valley area in the middle of the northern half of the Southern Alps. You get there by way means of State Highway (SH) 7, which runs through the area. One of the best multi-day hikes that you can do in the vicinity of the Lewis Pass is the St James Walkway, named after the former St…

My favourite wilderness hot pools are at Welcome Flat on the Copland River, on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The Copland is a tributary of the Karangarua, River which runs from the Southern Alps down to the Tasman Sea at a location south of Fox Glacier. Welcome Flat is on the lower part of the Copland River, at an altitude of about …

The West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island stretches for hundreds of kilometres, from the sunny northwest to cold and stormy Fiordland. It's an area with far fewer inhabitants than the eastern side of the South Island. Far fewer inhabitants, but a lot more rain! For in New Zealand the weather comes mainly from the west and metres of rain are dump…

I have tramped the Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand’s Great Walks, three times now. The walk stretches through the Kahurangi National Park at the top of the South Island, west of the famous Abel Tasman Track, and winds its way through native bush and tussock downs to the wild Tasman Sea on the West Coast, where some of the world's southernmost palm…

THE Nelson Lakes, Rotoroa and Rotoiti, and the associated Travers-Sabine Circuit are really one of the gems of the New Zealand outdoors, with their own Nelson Lakes National Park. The scenery is magnificent, there are plenty of huts to stay in, and good tracks. The lakes are very historic as Lake Rotoiti has a large population of eels, which Māori …

The Routeburn Track is one of New Zealand’s ten official Great Walks (soon to be eleven). In UNESCO World Heritage surroundings, the Routeburn Track was also reputedly named one of the eleven top trails in the world by National Geographic Adventure magazine in 2005. It leads from the headwaters of Lake Wakatipu to the Divide, on the road to Milford…

I had an adventure of quite a different kind when I went tramping and climbing in the Gertrude Valley, in NZ’s Fiordland National Park. Nestled underneath the Darran Mountain Range, the valley is reached from a carpark that turns off the Milford Road just before the eastern entrance to the Homer Tunnel. The Gertrude Saddle, at the head of the valle…

I did the Milford Track a few years ago with the Wakatipu Tramping Club. It’s New Zealand’s most famous hike, and the Sound is a wonder. "Mackinnon Pass bears the name of the Scottish explorer Quintin McKinnon, whose first and last names have both been written down in various ways. Like much of the South Island the pass has a real Scottish-highland…

IT was autumn when, fresh from the summer tramping season, I decided to hike the beautiful Hollyford Track in Fiordland National Park. It was an epic four-day journey with a pre-booked jetboat ride back along the lengthy finger lake known as Lake McKerrow, or Whakatipu Waitai, to shorten the return trip. I tramped the nine kilometres up from the en…

The Dusky Track, in the far southwest of NZ’s South Island, is about the same length as the popular Heaphy Track, but much gnarlier! You can do the Dusky Track in either direction. I did it from south to north. In that direction, you get to the Dusky Track by way of a ferry on Lake Hauroko,one of the southernmost big lakes in New Zealand and at 462…

Why only spend a day or two at the sound when you can spend a week on the road as well? MILFORD Sound, or Piopiotahi, is at the end of a scenic drive known as Te Anau Milford Highway (SH 94), or the Milford Road. People generally go to the sound for a day and come back. Alternatively, they may walk the Milford Track. But you can also spend a week o…

ONE of the classic New Zealand holidays simply involves heading along the coast north-west of Nelson, or Whakatū. You journey south-west to begin with, through Stoke and Richmond, which are now suburbs of Nelson/Whakatū, through Hope and Brightwater, as far as the historic town of Wakefield, which has the South Island’s oldest church, St Johns, dat…

What are some of my favourite walks, hikes and places to visit in the South Island? Here’s a short list. (Some are covered in more detail in other blog posts of mine, and linked to them accordingly.) To start with, I’ve just lately done the romantically named Moonlight Track, which runs from the beautiful Moke, pronounced Mokeh, Lake to Arthurs Poi…

The North Island of New Zealand’s rugged interior, explored by way of an almost abandoned highway, now popular with cycle tourists. JUST LATELY, I came across a diary of travels in old-time New Zealand called In the Land of the Tui. Published in London in the 1890s, the diary was kept by a woman named Eliza Wilson. At one point, the redoubtable Mrs…

AS A CHILD, I gained a strong connection to Lake Waikaremoana, the lake of rippling waters, which is located in the Māori stewardship area of Te Urewera (formerly Te Urewera National Park). Since Waikaremoana is only a few hours north of Hastings, my family used to camp out at the lake every Christmas holidays from when I was six years old until I …

Well worth a visit are Lakes Rotoaira and Rotopounamu, two beautiful lakes which lie halfway between the volcanoes of Tongariro National Park and Lake Taupō. Both lakes are bordered by native bush and closely overlooked by the bald-topped Mount Pihanga, visible at centre-right in the aerial photograph below. Lake Rotoaira was raised in the 1970s fo…