East Coast

The journey continued from Queenstown to Kaikoura. We saw New Zealand’s highest mountain and had our first earthquake experience.

Probably the most touristy town in New Zealand is Queenstown. It mixes mediterran and alpine vibes with an enormous playground for young and old, it is the adrenalin capital of the world. I am no adrenalin junkie, so I neither did bungy jumping or zip lining, for me it was interesting enough to watch the others. Maeve and I ate our best ice cream of the hole trip in an icecreamery in Queenstown, called Patagonia. Our favourite places were the park and Sunshine Bay, which you can access after a short walk through the bush.

A lot of walking was also the program for Mount Cook. We walked the Hooker Valley Walk, saw the nice Hooker Glacier and Mount Cook itself. Mount Cook village is a small collection of houses in a valley with access to many different hiking paths.

Christchurch surprised us with much more construction work than expected. The earthquake from 2011 is still visible everywhere in the city. On the other hand Christchurch had still an English flair and an awesome Art Gallery, next to a nice botanical garden. Another highlight was the friday night food market and the museum. I made my first earthquake experience at one of our nights. Maeve did not noticed it at all, but I was wide awake. It was just a medium sized quake, but for me it was terrifying.

Kaikoura, our next destination, is famous for it’s wildlife. You can encounter seals, dolphins, whales and many different birds. Even on our way into town we saw dolphins and seals. We had some nice fish and chips for lunch (which is a typical Kiwi food), but our day here was very foggy and cloudy.

Today we start our way back to Auckland. Our time in New Zealand is nearly over, but this is definitely not the end of our journey!

Fiordland

The South of the South

We arrived in the very south of New Zealand. Not only did we saw the stunning scenery of Fiordland, but had also some major problems with our bus company, Stray.

After a short one night stop in Queenstown, we made our way to Te Anau. This small holiday village was our New Year’s Eve destination and quite busy, because it is the peak season of summer holiday in New Zealand. Both, Queenstown and Te Anau, are located at beautiful lakes and have a nice waterfront with lots of activities going on.

On the way to Milford Sound we stoped at different other beautiful locations like Mirror Lake. Milford Sound, which actually is a fiord (or fjord as the European would write it), is for many tourists the number one place to visit on the South Island and it was totally worth it. We took an awesome boat cruise and had the best weather.

Gunn’s Camp, our accommodation for the next nights was a very traditional camp, without phone reception, without WiFi, with very limited power and with way too many sandflies. At least we could do some amazing bush walks there and had time to completly relax, without our phones as distractions. At the day we were leaving, we got really lucky, because I was not sleeping to well and woke Maeve up early. We got ready for the day with quite some time until the bus would be leaving, but we discovered, just when we were about to make some nice and relaxed breakfast, the bus was leaving one and a half hour earlier than exspected. We just had enough time to grab all our stuff and go to the bus, skipping breakfast. If we had not got up way too early, we would never had made this and I am not sure if the bus driver would have noticed that we were missing. The problem was: the driver and the other people on the bus decided to do a hike in the morning, but they did not inform us. How are we supposed to know this? If you are travelling with Stray and you hop off the bus, you do not get informed about anything. And this is a huge problem.

Invercargill’s best place to spend some nice hours is Queens Park. It is a wonderful and diverse botanical garden. Further has Invercargill some nice shopping streets, churches and cafés. Still it was probably smaller than most European would expect (same issue with most of the towns in New Zealand). In Invercargill the Stray story continued. We wanted to leave Invercargill in the morning and were there an hour early, because one of the drivers said beforehand they are quite early in Invercargill sometimes. The bus did not come, an hour late neither. We finally phoned the office and found out: the bus got resheldued to the afternoon. Again, no-one told us, they could at least write an email about this. So we spend half the day waiting for the bus and it was still an hour late when it finally arrived in the afternoon.

Now we are back in Queenstown, the adventure playground of New Zealand, for the next few days and soon we are heading to New Zealand’s highest mountain. . .

West Coast

Able Tasman, Westport, Greymouth, Franz Josef, those were our stops at the West Coast on the South Island. We had the full range from beautiful beaches to icy glaciers, from heavy rainfall to perfect sunshine.

The ferry ride from Wellington to Picton was three and a half hours long and we had some nice seats at the front of the ferry with a good view … and yes, I got pretty seasick, lucky I was able to sleep most of the time I felt bad.

We did not do much at our short Picton and Nelson stops, because we both got a cold. Getting sick itself is always bad, but it is specially inconvenient and uncomfortable if you are not at home. 

In Able Tasman we already felt much better and were able to enjoy the beauty of the Able Tasman National Park. We did a nice boat tour and a five hour hike through the park and were quite lucky with the weather. We even visited a small seal colony and saw some young seals. To be honest, this was not planned at all. We signed up for a boat trip, not for a 12km hike, because we were not completly well and fit after all. That the hike belongs to the boat tour was told to us right before entering the boat. We learned to really make sure what we sign up for and that hiking is incredible exhausting if you can not breath well. After two nights we left again, traveling to Westport.

Westport is a small town located at the West Coast of the South Island. The best thing about it was the old villa, which was our lovely hostel. Besides this, there was not too much to see there except the typical features of a small Kiwi town. Westport had a lot in common with Greymouth, our next stop, except that Greymouth was a bit larger and had a nice cinema. If you have less time at your journey through New Zealand, I would recommend skipping those places.

On our way to the next destination we made a stop at the well-known Pancake Rocks, took a nice and short walk there and had the best muffins of our hole trip so far!

After those smaller towns we came to the Franz Josef Glacier village and we visited the glacier itself. We both enjoyed the walk to the glacier and we had wonderful sunshine for the time we were walking, the next day was full of heavy rain.

On the way to Wanaka we stoped at the Fox Glacier and had another nice bush walk. Then we finally arrived in Wanaka, our accommodation for Christmas. We celebrated the holidays the best way possible in a hostel . We baked Christmas cookies, made a nice Christmas meal and had very relaxing days. We also saw the famous Wanaka tree and climbed Mount Iron, which was much higher than expected.

South of the South is our motto for the next stops, because Fiordland is waiting for us…