New Zealand - South Island

From the South Island port town of Picton, we collected another hire car & the 3 of us headed off to the town of Nelson, our first destination on our way down the west coast of the South Island. When we were the last time for Darren & Nic’s wedding we took the route down the east coast of the South Island, so we thought we would see the other side of the country this time.

Nelson is the main access town to the Abel Tasman National Park - a coastal National Park of white sand beaches, crystal clear turquoise waters & rugged island outcrops - an area popular for multi day sea kayak safaris, coastal walks & sea lion spotting boat trips. We were finding New Zealand to be pretty expensive (particularly coming from South America) - & even for the most basic activity the prices always seemed to start at $60, very quickly rising to several hundred dollars. As a result we just had a couple of days around the Abel Tasman area doing the things on offer that were free, before moving on out to work our way along the west coast.

Thankfully on the first day of driving it was a beautifully sunny, allowing us to appreciate the natural beauty of the area. With the Southern Alps mountain range rising up on our left & the Pacific Ocean on our right, driving through largely unspoilt wilderness we stumbled on a sign for an old gold mine along the way. Intrigued, we pulled in to have a look around. The place was owned by an old eccentric engineer, who had hand made the majority of the contraptions in the mine to extract the gold with - though these days his somewhat alcoholic son was ’looking after’ the place. The son welcomed us in, greeted us with a beer each, gave us a tub of raw meat & sent us off through the overgrown rain forest mine to feed the huge eels living in one of the creeks. Despite the fact that the place looks like it hasn’t been used since the 1800’s, his father still intermittently goes out & attempts to find gold in them there hills - apparently once you get gold fever, you’ll never get rid of it. He showed us through some old newspaper clipping from the early 1900’s when the whole area was under going something of a gold rush, & the nearby town (the name of which escapes us…) was the epicentre, with around 100,000 people living there. These days, the gold rush has well & truly got up & rushed elsewhere, & the town is now home to only around 50 people, though the locals there still appear to live life with that outlaw frontier spirit. Our new little gold digging friend - clearly a man that enjoyed a good time, recommended a little place tucked away a couple of miles down the road that acted as the local night club & pizza joint. We turned up to find a barn, half of which had a few tables & chairs in, the other half was decked out with a make shift bar, mirror ball & glitter wall paper - this being the ‘nightclub’. We had apparently missed the action by one night, as the place with littered with a few local casualties from the previous night still struggling to get it together to make their way home - could’ve been an interesting night if we had made it there a day earlier!

Working our way further down the coast we stop off at a few beauty spots, Tauranga Bay, the Punakaiki ’pancake’ rocks & a seal colony before arriving in the town of Franz Josef - named after the glacier that cuts it’s way down the mountain side & turns into the river at the edge of town. Leanne went out a full day guided glacier hike, having skipped Patagonia while in South America - the group followed their axe wielding guide, cutting steps into the ice with the axe & leading them through crevasses & sink holes.

After stopping off at the lakeside town of Wanaka for a couple of days - where it did nothing but rain the entire time, we carried further on to the south west corner of the island into Fjord land & the town of Te Anau where we based ourselves for a few days for our visit to most impressive of New Zealand’s Fjords - Milford Sound.

The weather was now superb, lovely and hot and Te Anau is set on another gorgeous lake surrounded by mountains. We have a day to chill and then head off to Milford Sound, where Leanne is booked up for Kayaking around the fjord. We opt for the more leisurely approach…a boat cruise up Milford Sound, which thankfully we did first thing in the morning when it was lovely and sunny, as by lunch time yet again it was raining. Milford Sound is just one of the many fjords in the area, and is stunning - although the constant barrage of sand flies relentlessly biting you gets really quite annoying.

We head to Queenstown the following day for the last few days before Leanne leaves for Australia and we head across to the south east coast for a few days until our flight.
Slightly hung over after a night out in Queenstown, Leanne signs herself up for a skydive - cancelled an hour before the planned time due to bad weather, leaving her to endure a further 24 hours of torturous waiting… finally the next day, she does the jump amid lots of apparent hyperventilating and being half thrown out of the plane by the instructor, but loved it in the end. Another one to tick off the list, but another one never to do again!

We leave Leanne in Queenstown to catch her flight to Sydney and drive towards Dunedin on the South East coast. Dunedin is modelled on Edinburgh and the architecture, hills and general feel of the place are exactly that, complete with a bagpipe playing band parading up the main street while we were there.

We spend a few days in Dunedin and took a drive around the Otago Peninsula to an albatross reserve and the only castle in New Zealand. Being tight skin flint travellers & having seen Albatross in Patagonia & traipsed around plenty of castles in the UK, we decide against going in - as yet again they were both charging $60 per person.

We drive round the stunning windswept and rugged South coast, visiting a Petrified forest that is millions of years old, where the fallen trees on the shoreline have now turned to stone. We stay our final night in a hostel that is an old converted fire station, in a weird hick town called Gore. A novel approach to running a hostel, there was no one staffing the place, you just help yourself to a room and the facilities, write you name on a board and leave the cash in an envelope under the owners door… very trusting! We were the only people there but as we discovered in the evening when we walked into town, there is absolutely nothing to do here, not even a decent pub (other than another book makers boozer) and the supermarkets don’t sell alcohol… another movie it was then…

After a good, if somewhat damp month in New Zealand, we leave Queenstown & fly to Sydney in time for Christmas.