Some of my South Island Faves

WHAT are some of my favourite walks, hikes and places to visit in the South Island? Here's a short list.

(Some are covered in more detail in other blog posts of mine, and linked to them accordingly.)

To start with, I’ve just lately done the romantically named Moonlight Track, which runs from the beautiful Moke, pronounced Mokeh, Lake to Arthurs Point in the hills behind New Zealand's informal tourist capital of Queenstown. The track’s named after a prospector called George Fairweather Moonlight: but I like to think it would be fun to do it under a full moon as well!

Short but stiff is the Lake Hauroko Lookout Track, in Fiordland. Described by New Zealand's Department of Conservation (DOC) as “steep and rough, but well worth the effort,” you get to it by driving from Tūātapere, west of Invercargill in Southland. A town that is itself the gateway to the Tūātapere Hump Ridge Track.

Closer to Queenstown, once more, I love to visit the Bannockburn Sluicings, a desolate Wild West landscape created by old time gold miners who sluiced away the earth to get at nuggets. St Bathans in the nearby Ida Valley is similar, but with a lake.

Many of the best multi-day hikes take the form of loop routes in the mountains above a lake, of which several of the best are also located close to Queenstown. The Kepler Walk is a good example, but there are plenty of others not formally gazetted as Great Walks.

These include the loop route known as the Wilkin-Young Circuit north of Lake Wānaka, which you can combine with a visit to the Blue Pools on the Makarora River, just up the main road toward the Haast Pass. Between the catchments of the Wilkin and the Young Rivers you go through the Gillespie Pass, next to Mount Awful, and down the Siberia Stream. Like a lot of the more adventurous South Island trips, this one’s really better done in warm weather!

Just north of the Haast Pass, if you really want to make a week of it in this wild yet accessible area (which has several campgrounds), is the Brewster Track up to the Brewster Hut, below the Brewster Glacier. This is a straight up and down track, arduous, but very scenic. The Brewster Hut looks down on the pass and into nearby canyons from a superelevation of almost a thousand metres. The glacier-covered shoulders of Mount Brewster range more a thousand metres above the Brewster Hut.

Closer to Queenstown still is the Caples/Greenstone Circuit through the McKellar Pass. You start from a spot near the head of Lake Wakatipu, a delightful area dominated by the Paradise Valley. It’s not nearly as gothic and gloomy as the British drama Top of the Lake implies!

Also at the top of the lake is the Rees-Dart Circuit, which offers a side trip up to some additional glaciers and the option of going over the Cascade Saddle Track into the Matukituki Valley, dominated by the once more glacier-covered Rob Roy Peak and further up the valley, Tititea/MountAspiring, ‘the Matterhorn of the South’.

In the same area, the Routeburn Track, described as "the ultimate alpine adventure" by DOC and others, is a must-do if you are up to it!

Further to the west, our best known Great Walk, the Milford Track, itself mostly fairly easy apart from the bit that leads over Mackinnon Pass, goes past the epically high Sutherland Falls.

(At 750 metres or two and a half thousand feet, the nearby Terror Falls, which drain an un-named lake near Terror Peak, are even taller than the Sutherland Falls. But they aren’t as easy to get to. I love some of those names by the way: Terror Peak’s not far, itself, from Mount Danger—and so on!)

No doubt the most famous glacial landscape in New Zealand is Milford Sound/Piopiotahi: a fiord to which the Milford Track leads and into which the Arthur River feeds. It is ruled, itself, by Mitre Peak, which rises for a mile out of the waters of the fiord.

There are four continuous national parks in the South-Western part of the South Island, which together comprise a World Heritage area known as Te Wāhipounamu, 'the source of pounamu (New Zealand jade)'.

The Kepler Track, a purpose-made loop track, offers divine views of both lakes Manapōuri and Te Anau.

Further north on the West Coast, the Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier descend almost to sea level. Among the three thousand glaciers of New Zealand these two are special, as the last two remaining examples of the great glaciers of the Ice Ages: glaciers that didn’t hide in the mountains but descended to lower levels to create fiords and big valleys.

At any rate, these two survivors used to come down that far, in historical times. They have retreated due to global warming and changes in snowfall. Still, the sight of two glaciers grinding through green rainforest is remarkable, even now.

Some way to the south of the Fox Glacier and the town that bears the same name, a track leads up another glacial valley of the now-empty sort to Welcome Flat. Wonderful natural hot pools are located there. The valley continues up and over the Copland Pass to New Zealand’s highest mountain, Aoraki/Mount Cook, and is very scenic. Before Copland Pass it is also a fairly easy tramp, as these flat-bottomed but scenic valleys often are.

Further north still, there are many terrific walks around Arthur's Pass township and, also, in the Lewis Pass area.

Near the township of Kumara on the West Coast, itself not far from the bigger town of Hokitika, there’s the Goldsborough Campsite. Reviewers think this is one of the best places to camp in New Zealand, lovely and secluded with lots of scenic walks nearby, though the campsite itself is not very big and can be crowded if your visit concides with a festival or the Coast to Coast endurance race. It’s an old goldmining area and you might still find a few specks in the local streams with the panning gear that DOC provides for anyone to use, if you’re eagle-eyed enough.

The northern end of the South Island is sometimes known as the Prow, from the Māori legend whereby the South Island is the canoe from which the demigod Māui hauled the North Island, Te-Ika-a-Maui – Māui’s fish – out of the great ocean.

‍

Most of the attractions at the northern end of the South Island are on the coasts, both in the north-west and also around the Marlborough Sounds. Coasts which are actually lined with palm trees, the southernmost palms in the world. The interior is pierced, all the same, by the Heaphy Track, the local Great Walk, which runs from one coast to the other via the Kahurangi National Park.

If you want to venture into the back country in these parts, without going so far as to commit yourself to the Heaphy Track, a good place both for a short trip,and for longer tramps through an upland known as the Nelson Tablelands, is Flora Hut. It’s not far from the end of the Graham Valley South Branch Road, itself a short drive from the fruit-growing town of Motueka.

Pristine, still, are the Nelson Lakes, a little further inland and to the south, on the way to the West Coast by road.

So, if you’ve had your fill of fiords and glaciers and want to retire to somewhere that’s a bit more warm and peachy near the coast, without leaving the island, the Prow is the place to go.

That’s another amazing thing about the South Island as compared to most holiday destinations. Just in the space of a day or two’s drive, you can go from a place that’s like Norway to a place that’s got warm beaches, waving palm trees and all sorts of fruit for sale by the side of the road in season. And it’s just up the road. Well, several hundred kilometers up the road, but up the road anyway.

Down the east coast, coastal attractions include Kaikōura, Banks Peninsula and the Catlins.

Another feature of the South Island is its old colonial towns and cities. One of the most underrated is Oamaru where you have white limestone architecture, stately town gardens, the Steampunk museum, antiques, and penguins,

Timaru has the distinction of having most known examples of ancient South Island Maori rock art are within 70 km. You can do a tour taking in sacred sites between Timaru and Ōmārama. And there's the Te Ana ('the cave') museum in the middle of Timaru, dedicated to Māori rock art as well.

There's much that's of natural significance, and comparatively recent historical significance, in this area as well.

Invercargill has magnificent beaches and museums including the Southland Museum. And then there are Dunedin, Christchurch with its nearby Banks Peninsula and mountain foothills, and Nelson.

Across the water, you can head for Rakiura/Stewart Island,where much of the local tramping is embodied in the Rakiura Great Walk. I especially enjoy visiting Mason Bay on the west side of the Island.

And finally the Chatham Islands, which are the subject of no less than four posts on this blog.

(The posts linked here do not exhaust all references to my favourite South Island places on this blog, either!)

‍

If you liked the post above, check out my new book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍