After the ferry ride from Wellington to Picton, we made our way towards the west coast of New Zealand. The first night we made it through wine country and stopped for a pint and glass of wine at the Cork and Keg and continued on to St. Arnaud before we parked the Hippie Camper for the evening. The next day was a long haul to the glacier area. We stopped throughout the day to see the sights like Pancake Rocks, and a brewery. We also had a seaside picnic lunch.

For the next two days we traveled around the most picturesque part of the island. We spent a morning exploring Fox Glacier. In recent years the glacier has actually been advancing, but it is a cyclical glacier so it goes through phases. We traveled through the twisty roads to Queenstown and on to Fjordland. We spent the better part of a day touring Doubtful Sound. The sound is NOT easy to get to. First you have to cross a lake (by boat), then take a 45 min bus ride over a pass to the dock to board the actual boat to take you on the three-and-a-half hour tour of the sound and then do the whole thing in reverse. This is the easy way to get there. A couple of decades ago New Zealand built a hydro-electric plant between the lake and the sound. The use the difference in water level and send the water through the mountain in tunnels they blasted out with dynamite. So the current “infrastructure” exists for the power plant. Back in the day it would have been a hike over the pass. We “lucked” out and got an an early morning tour that normally doesn’t run and had a tour group of 23 instead of the usual 135. On the return trip, we were driven down into the plant to see the turbines in action. (They look a lot like the Hoover Dam.)

Over the next two-and-a-half days we completed our almost circle of the southern island. We did not take the coast road across the bottom of the island like the tourists are supposed to. We did spend a leisurely afternoon in Dunedin and made our way to Christchurch.

Overall, we had a great time in our scooby shack, we made it through the chilly nights at least two of them were 40 F or below, without a heater. We liked using our new New Zealand vocab: wee, chiller and cooker are among our favorites. Alas, we had to turn the van in when our first visitor arrived in Christchurch!

Don’t worry though, the driving continues! Beth was a trooper and we went to Willowbank to view the kiwi birds at night when they are most active. We also got to see an array of other native New Zealand animals. We were off to Mt Cook, Sir Edmund Hillary trained there for Everest. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t too cooperative so we never saw the peak, but we did see snow, ice and the eastern side of the mountain range we drove through about a week earlier. After two days of driving through the countryside we are off to another continent!

Tags: camping · mountains · New Zealand · snow · wildlife