Still, we realised that without some sort of plan, we could miss some highlights, so the night before departing, we came up with a rough itinerary: a clockwise loop down the east coast, across to Fiordland in the south-west and then up the west coast, before heading back to our starting point through one of the few alpine mountain passes.
After a couple of days of beautiful weather in Christchurch, we awoke on the Wednesday morning to rain and a biting easterly wind. A quick check on weather forecasts suggested that this was probably set in for a few days, whilst the weather on the west coast was sunny and 5 degrees warmer (a reversal of the more usual pattern apparently), so with a moment of decisiveness, we decided to reverse our route. This proved a great decision, because we had mostly great weather on our jaunt down the west coast, whilst the east was cold, wet and windy (though nothing on the scale of the poor old UK - we hope that all of our British readers are dry and safe).
So, we headed out of a cold, wet Christchurch and headed due west through farmland that steadily rose towards snow-capped mountain peaks. This road was originally built by European settlers, when gold was discovered in the western foothills: initially no way was found through the Southern Alps, until a prospector found his way through following old Maori routes and the dramatic Arthur's Pass continues to be named after him. As we came over the pass, we could see the line of the cold front, with clear blue skies in the distance toward the coast - an island of two halves indeed!
The west coast is wild and rugged, with a thin coastal strip between the mountains and the Tasman Sea and bordered to the south by the Fiordland wilderness. Maori people travelled up and down this land for thousands of years, making good use of the bountiful fishing and trading the prized jade stone. The early European settlers found the going much harder: with the coast battered by storms from the Tasman Sea, heavy rainfall for much of the year and the natural isolation from the rest of the country. Some areas boomed when gold was discovered in the 19th century, but fell into decline just as quickly as it was mined out.
Notwithstanding all of this, we were astonished to find that this 500+ mile long strip is populated by just 32,000 people, though this is swelled many times over in the peak holiday season.
For us, this was a truly spectacular place to drive through and it certainly matched up to its reputation and our expectations. In Christchurch, we had bought a tent and we used this for a few nights on this first leg of our New Zealand tour to allow us to stay in some remote and beautiful places. After hitting the west coast at the village of Hokitika, we camped by the side of Lake Kaniere - alongside some guys from Sheffield trying their hand at trout fishing, a couple from Washington DC and some locals who used the lake for their speedboats.
Better was to come as we headed south though, as the next night we found a great camp site within view of the Franz Josef Glacier.
The twin glaciers of the Southern Alps (Franz Josef and Fox), deserve some mention. At this point, Mount Cook (New Zealand's highest peak at 3,754 metres) falls sharply towards the coastal plain and with such high levels of precipitation on this coast, these glaciers form - sliding dramatically towards the valley floor at the rate of more than a metre a day. They are a wonderful sight, resembling an eruption of volcanic ice, or a waterfall suddenly frozen in full flow. Sadly, with global warming these glaciers are steadily retreating and with current trends, they will probably be gone altogether within our lifetimes.
We spent 2 full days here, hiking up to the base of each glacier - at elevations of about 1,500 metres. Both were great walks, with the vistas improving each time we rounded a bluff. There was a small stream of other people walking up with us, but generally nothing to spoil the serenity of the scene, other than the regular buzz of helicopters, whisking people up over the glacier for a $350, 20 minute joy-ride - we weren't tempted by that offer!
Away from the mountains, by the coast, we found the old gold rush town of Okarito. At its peak, 10,000 people were based here seeking their fortunes and there were dozens of hotels, bars, shops and other amenities - it must have been a wild place! Today, all evidence of this has vanished, other than some old photos on display in a preserved wharf building, and it is little more than a hamlet with a handful of houses overlooking a windswept bay and lagoon. It was the latter which prompted our stop, because it is apparently the largest unmodified wetland in New Zealand and home to all manner of bird-life.
I took a kayak out onto the lagoon for a couple of hours, getting up close to a variety of hawks, herons, oyster-catchers, plovers, stalks, shags and terns (though sadly not a kiwi, which are found in this area, but are nocturnal). This was a beautiful and serene way to explore the area, paddling in still silence, across the lagoon, with dense native forest and mangrove hugging the shoreline and the towering Mount Cook and the glaciers in the background.
Sue decided to take the land route instead, walking around the lagoon and along the beach and she had lots of information to pass on when I returned. Most exciting, was that this was the home of Keri Hulme, the Booker Prize winning author of The Bone People (a novel which inspired Sue in her late teens). The Bone People had a very strong, and evocatively described, sense of place: and we could both feel how this place could have inspired that.
The guys who ran the kayak centre were a great bunch and we sat and drank coffee with them for a while. Often people in tourist areas aren't interested in communicating beyond a superficial, practical level, but we could easily have spent the day here chatting with them. Amazingly, one of the women who ran the place had spent a year or so in the UK, with much of that time financed by bar tending at the White Hart in Brasted - one of our local pubs!
We continued, with a long drive south following the coastline. The skies were clear and we were treated to one spectacular view after another: sometimes close to the water's edge past deserted stretches of sandy beach, sometimes from high above over precipitous cliff tops.
We were heading towards Queenstown, but we broke our journey for the night in the hamlet of Haast, where there wasn't much apart from a few motels and a lively bar which served up decent pub grub, mostly to tourists like us. We were intrigued to follow an extension of the road to the village of Port Jackson, which really is the end of the line: nothing beyond here but fiords and then the Antarctic. The road to Port Jackson was terrific: dead straight through ancient forest, with tree species that we had never seen before. It felt as though we had been teleported back to the 'land that time forgot' and that dinosaurs would poke their heads above the canopy at any moment!
Port Jackson was an eerie place, with a small cluster of houses and a rotting, rusting pier which looked like the next good storm would bring down. At the end of it, a sullen local, bearded and hooded, was fishing for salmon or anything else that would bite (though the only things that seemed to be biting were the voracious sand flies who were having a feast on us). 'You from the UK?' he asked mid-cast. When we answered in the affirmative, he divulged that he was a 5th generation Cornish immigrant. We might be related, I thought, but he didn't seem much of a conversationist, so we left him to his fishing and headed back to the insect free sanctum of the car.
The next day, we cut inland into the heart of the Southern Alps. In our next post, we will tell you all about this: including the adventure centre of Queenstown and it's surrounding villages; the magnificent Fiordland and our route through all of this natural wonder.
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