Having finally recovered from my encounter with ‘the bird,’ we moved onto Arthur’s Pass, which was fantastic. Such great driving and hiking (even though the weather was crappy.)

From here, we drove to Christchurch. We weren’t really sure what to expect, we’d heard differing opinions about the city but we really, really liked it. Such cool architecture, cafes, gardens and even though the reminders of the earthquakes are everywhere to see, it doesn’t feel run down or eerie. Instead, there’s a lot of building work going on showing how the city is getting back on its feet and regenerating. I found an awesome yoga studio to go to for a few days and so Sam worked on….well, I’m not entirely sure, but it was bound to some something tech related!

We then headed east through the Banks Peninsula, to a teeny town called Akaroa. Again, the weather wasn’t great and this kind of limited what we could do.However, the drive there was spectacular- stunning views everywhere we looked.

Yes, admittedly the weather is great in this particular shot but this was on the way out!

We then made our way over to Hanmer Springs, somewhere I’d heard lots of great things about. It’s basically a small village inland, with lots of hiking and biking tracks as well as there famous Hanmer Springs Thermal Spa (guess which part Sam was excited about?!) The weather finally played ball and it was beautiful the whole time we were there. We hiked, spent hours in the thermal spas and had an awesome date night- if you’re ever there, I’d recommend No. 31 bar and restaurant, worth the splurge. Annoyingly, our camera ran out of battery so we couldn’t take many photos.

This morning, we’ve scooted along to Kaikoura- a great little coastal town, where we’ll hopefully see whales and dolphins on Sunday (not particularly optimistic.) We plan to spend a few days here and then off to Blenheim for more wine!

We realised that we’ve been in NZ almost 10 weeks now- time has FLOWN! We’re feeling strangely attached to Vanatar and are kind of dreading giving him up because then it’ll be back to packing up our bags every couple of days and having to get buses and boats to places. Although these boats will be in Fiji so I guess I can’t complain. Life right now is pretty good for the Atkinsons!

The views just keep getting better and better. I don’t understand how. NZ has definitely wrecked all walks and scenery in the future for us because we’ve been spoilt so rotten.

After Dunedin we headed over to Mt Cook, the tallest peak in NZ at 3724m.  Fortunately it’s not something you can walk up, but it has plenty of walks around it.  We camped in a simple but beautiful DOC (read: cheap) campsite and used it as a base for 2 or 3 walks, the main one taking us to a lake with actual icebergs in it! Small icebergs, but they count.

As you can see from the photos, the views are incredible.  The way the cloud rolled over the peaks and formed a roof over the mountains was something I’ve never seen before and created a really beautiful effect.

Desperately in need of a shower (they tend not to have them on DOC campsites) we then barrelled on to a town called Geraldine.  As you can see on our travel map we’ve been covering big distances each day in the last week, which has cost a fortune in fuel but we’ve packed a fair amount of walks in. There’s not a huge amount else to do around this neck of the woods to be honest, as significant towns are few and far between.

We had intended to use Geraldine as a base to go and do a significant day walk at another mountain, Mt Somner, but once we’d gotten there we discovered our guide book had massively undersold the nature of the hike; the path was steep, poorly formed, and slippy. The weather was crap and we quickly gave up and decided to backtrack to peel forest to try some easier walks.  Whilst these were perfectly nice, the weather was quickly turning and we were both a bit fed up.  After a quick google I managed to find a nice boutique cinema a couple of hours away in the ski town of Methven, and it turned out to be the release day of Spectre in NZ! Highly recommend it, possibly the best Bond yet.

We’re only a day or two from Christchurch now.  This morning we did a 4 hour walk at Rakaia Gorge, an incredible river with luminous blue waters that have cut out a huge chunk of the landscape.  Whilst being an enjoying and challenging walk, it was slightly marred when, at the big view at the end of the walk, a large bird of some sorts (“The bird equivalent of the Indominus Rex”) swooped down and stole Laura’s sunglasses from the top of her head! Laura is fortunately unhurt, but understandably angry at the bird (Laura: “I hope it chokes on the plastic.”)

For tomorrow, we have decided first to come and explore Arthurs Pass, one of the 3 routes over the mountains from East to West on the south island.  Surprise surprise; it has lots of walks, which we’ll embark on tomorrow. We’ve driven over to the West of the pass, and will head back East in the next day or two.  Arthurs Pass has to be one of the best roads we’ve driven on the whole trip though, with huge mountain ranges on either side looming over as you drive, along with some fun 16% gradient roads thrown in to test Vanatar’s prowess.

Wowzer, feels like it’s been ages since I wrote a post- speedy Sam keeps beating me to it.

After the Kepler track (so much steepness,) we took a bus to Milford Sound. This proved to be a great idea as we were so tired and in no mood for driving. Milford Sound was one of those places that every Kiwi we know had told us to visit- now we see why.

It’s so enormous and it makes you feel tiny and insignificant compared to how awesome nature is. Definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. Our boat was nice and small compared to the other huge cruise liner type things out on the water, and it was just generally a lovely day. Apparently it rains over 200 days a year out in Milford so even though it was overcast with a lot of low cloud, that was classed as awesome weather. Along the way, we stopped to do a few mini hikes and see stuff like this, Mirror Lakes:

The next day, we moved onto Invercargill. The less said about this, the better. The only thing it seems to have going for it is a PaknSave (think Aldi on a much bigger scale.) We quickly got out of there and headed to the Catlins Coast, somewhere we’d heard great things about, from people on the Kepler track. We drove along the southern scenic route (not actually that scenic) but found some lovely little hikes and things to see on the way.

We stayed at a campsite right next to a beach and were lucky enough to see a colony of sea lions sunbathing as we walked right past them. They were so well camouflaged we almost walked into one! Seals are becoming an everyday sighting now also- but STILL no dolphins or whales.

We think he’s called Ben.

From the Catlins, we carried onto Dunedin, NZ’s self proclaimed ‘Scottish city.’ I was imagining it to be a mini Edinburgh and in some respects it is-lots of gothic architecture and lovely shops- quite a few of them seemed heavily Scottish themed. The only down side about being in a city is that we end up spending far more than we should- this was no exception. Lots of coffees, a visit to Cadbury world (Sam had never been to the UK one) many margaritas, cinema etc all adds up massively. I managed to find an excellent hot yoga studio as well- yippee! After all of this spending, we thought we’d head out to the Otago Peninsula, about 45 mins from Dunedin. In such a small place, we’d be bound to save money, right? WRONG. “Ooh, look a castle- let’s go into the grounds- won’t cost that much. Ooh and there’s a penguin colony in a conservation site- let’s do the guided tour. Shall we get another coffee? How about a nice lunch somewhere?” So pricey. We need to lay off spending for a while.

The penguin tour was definitely worth the money though. Sam has been wanting to see penguins since we got here but it’s tricky to see them in their natural habitat. ‘Penguin Place’ is a family run conservation area, that’s working to encourage Yellow eyed penguins. There’s only around 3000 of them left in the world and you can only see them in certain areas of NZ. We were lucky enough to see quite a few today, as well as Blue eyed penguins nesting.

Meet Jim. He’s 22 and had three penguin wives. He can’t make up his mind.

With only 3 weeks left in the south island, we need to start getting a shifty on. This afternoon we’ll head up the east coast and then bounce back and forward between there and the central south. We hope to be in Christchurch in around 7-10 days. After that, it’s back upto Marlborough, but to the other side this time, to visit some more wineries. We’ll go to Kaikoura for a couple of days to hopefully to see whales, but with our luck so far, probably not. From the south island, we’ll head back to the north island and up to Martinbrough (more wine,) back to Taupo to do the Tongariro Alpine Crossing and then over to the Coromandel coast, hopefully with a stop in Hamilton to see a friend. From the Coromandel, it’ll be full steam ahead  back to Auckland to see my lovely friend Nicola for a few days, before we say bye bye to NZ and hop on over to Fiji for a month of sun, sea and diving.  So much to do, so little time to do it all!

Having already invested in all the gear needed for multi-day hikes we thought we would tick off another of NZ’s great walks. In Fiordland there are 3 available: The Milford, Routeburn and Kepler.  Milford track is the most popular, and it turns out the huts are booked up over a year in advance which ruled that out.  Routeburn currently has major avalanche risks, which would’ve required us to get helicoptered part of the way (at a not insignificant cost.) Which made our decision for us: we were going to walk the Kepler track!

The Kepler can be done in 2 or 3 nights; after the agony with our backpacks during the Abel Tasman Coastal Track we decided to do it in 2 nights; more walking but with less to carry.  Laura managed to get all of her stuff into a daypack thanks to some impressive MacGuyvering of cables and carabiners.  This meant we had a lot of walking to do on the last day, but it looked feasible as it was mostly flat on day 3, unlike the first two days.

Our plan was to stay at Luxmore hut on the first night (after climbing nearly 1000m), Iris Burn on the second night (after decending another 800m or so) then make it to Rainbow Reach on the final day (where we were picked up by a shuttle bus.)

One of the reasons this track is meant to be so wonderful is the diversity of the nature on show and it really did deliver.  The route was part forest, part tundra, part alpine hills (snow!) and even a beach in there at one point.  For me personally it was even more amazing than the Abel Tasman and some of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen.  I don’t think walking will be the same again for me anywhere else.

The climb on the first day was surprisingly not too bad; the inclines weren’t too steep and our bags were mercifully light in comparison which meant we made it to the hut by 3 in the afternoon in quite a good condition.  This is one of the most beautiful huts in NZ and we were treated to epic views like this:

The hut even has a permanent ranger, who gave us a one hour nature tour and a guide to the stars- with zero light pollution and no moon the stars were really clear and you could even make out the Milky Way.

We made one mistake though.  Having seen the profile we’d assumed most of the climbing was done and it was mostly downhill, so we ate all of our chocolate (the only treat we’d brought.)  Turned out that was a massive error, as day 2 had a gruelling climb to the summit, followed by an incredibly sharp descent that was even more painful than going up the mountain!

Despite the pain, the views on the second day were truly second to none, looking down over Lake Te Anau and over to alpine mountains on all sides.

The final day was 7 hours of downhill, which we managed to knock out in under 5.  Although it was easy walking, by this point both of our feet were killing (my shoes are slightly too small so my toes hurt, and Laura had blisters) and we were exhausted thanks to someone in the bunk room who snored like an elephant so we were just desperate for it to be over.  You can see how happy we are at the end.