Giveaways
THE WEST COAST of the South Island stretches for about 800 kilometres (500 miles) from Cape Farewell in the far north of the island to Puysegur Point in Fiordland; though by convention the ‘Coast’ ends at Jackson Head just south of Haast Pass, everything south of that being Fiordland.
The West Coast is an area with far fewer inhabitants than the eastern side of the South Island. Far fewer inhabitants, but a lot more rain! For in New Zealand the weather comes mainly from the west and metres of rain are dumped each year in the hills whose streams run to the west.
From the north, the South Island's West Coast begins, just off the map above, with the Whanganui Inlet west of Cape Farewell and a stretch of trackless coast north of the Heaphy River.
The Heaphy Track comes out at the Heaphy River and continues south along the coast to the Kohaihai Shelter and Campsite, where the West Coast’s road system begins (yay).
The Kohahai Campsite has nīkau palms sprouting from white sand and looks quite tropical: an appearance that’s typical of the northern part of the West Coast. The angle of the South Island means that it’s not just Nelson that’s sheltered from Antarctic winds, but much of the West Coast as well.
Near Karamea, you might want to explore the caves and arches of the Oparara River. In this photograph, of the Moria Gate Arch, there's a hint of the lushness of vegetation that's such a feature of the South Island's West Coast, where rainfall is measured in metres per year and the landscape generally as different to the barrens of central Otago as could possibly be, even though these regions are on the same island!
From Karamea, let's follow the road trip marked in red on the map above! From the end of the Heaphy Track, we go past the side-roads that lead to the Wangapeka Track and the Old Ghost Road, all of which I talk about in my Heaphy Track and Old Ghost Road blog post.
There are strong coal- and gold-mining traditions in this area. It's worth visiting the ghost coal-mining town of Denniston. A little inland between Westport and Granity, Denniston sits on a plateau more than 600 metres or two thousand feet above sea level. The weather is terrible at Denniston a lot of the time; but the town has commanding views of the coast on a good day.
The isolated community that lived at Denniston there is now almost all gone, but in its day the hill town was famous not just for romantic isolation but also for the Denniston Incline, a fearsome steel-wire ropeway. Here's an excellent, short, documentary made in 1967, the year the Denniston Incline finally closed.
At Westport, there is a surprisingly impressive town hall for such a comparatively small community.
From Westport, you can head inland through the Buller Gorge and around the Brunner and Victoria Ranges, including Victoria Forest Park, in a loop via Springs Junction, Reefton and Inangahua. This is a really scenic region with lots of places to go tramping and with more relics of mining. It's a fair way inland but it is still regarded as part of the West Coast, since it's west of the Lewis Pass into Canterbury and the Hope Saddle into Nelson.
As in all mining areas, there have been lots of tragedies.
And strikes too. One epic struggle at Blackball in 1908 contributed to the eventual formation of the New Zealand Labour Party.
Heading back to Westport you might want to visit Cape Foulwind, obviously not named by a real estate agent, but actually by Captain Cook after his ship Endeavour was blown offshore in this area in 1770.
Cape Foulwind is a bracing short walk, which can indeed be very windy, with cliffs and seals: the New Zealand Department of Conservation, DOC, has a web page on the Cape Foulwind Walkway and PDF brochure on 'Walks in the Westport area' which includes other walks.
South of Westport, on the coast road, is the epic Paparoa National Park, which includes the Paparoa Track (Great Walk) over the tops, the low-altitude Inland Pack Track which follows on from it with incredibly lush ferny bush, and the must-see coastal locality of Punakaiki. The Pike29 Memorial Track, in honour of twenty-nine miners killed in the unsafe Pike River coal mine in 2010, is due to open in 2021.
The pancake rocks are not the only attraction at Punakaiki, a beautiful place with cafés and dramatic standing rocks on the beach, all amid more nīkau palms. Punakaiki's tourism website is punakaiki.co.nz.
See, also, the DOC webpage on Paparoa National Park.
The next sizable town, heading southward along the coast, is Greymouth. This is the biggest town on the West Coast, with a population of a bit over eight thousand. From Greymouth and its beach suburb of Blaketown you can see the South Island’s great, long mountain range, commonly known as the Southern Alps or Kā Tiritiri o te Moana, which literally means that which is cultivated by the sea but has a more poetical significance, I believe.
As indeed, from much of the central part of the West Coast.
Not far south of Greymouth is the still rather frontier-like town of Hokitika (population just under three thousand) where some of the action in the 1999 New Zealand period drama Greenstone and the more recent BBC drama The Luminaries is set.
Hokitika hasn’t changed much since the days of Greenstone and The Luminaries,except that it is a bit more tidied-up.
As in the other parts of the West Coast, there are heaps of things to do in the Hokitika area. For instance, in spite of its small size, the town is quite touristy and even has two movie theatres.
I would like to do the Treetop experience as well!
Between Greymouth and Hokitika, and going inland, are several other interesting places to visit. These include Lakes Kaniere, Brunner/Moana and Mahinapua, the last of which is small but scenic.
See the DOC pamphlet Walks in the Hokitika area from Kumara to Ross, which includes the Ross Historic Goldfields to the south of Hokitika; also the DOC webpage on the Lake Brunner area.
Here’s a map and inset photograph from the pamphlet:
It’s in this area that you can also do the West Coast Wilderness Trail on foot or on a bike: westcoastwildernesstrail.co.nz.
You can do it freelance, and there are also operators who will provide accommodation and bikes. Here’s a rough map screenshot from the West Coast Wilderness Trail website, which also has an app you can download as well as a more sophisticated downloadable map.
One thing the Wilderness Trail doesn’t take in, but that is mentioned in the DOC pamphlet, is the Hokitika Gorge with its blue pools, 33 km southeast of Hokitika via Kokatahi. These blue pools are sometimes milky, and sometimes clear.
South of Ross, the West Coast gets a lot wilder still. Before going on to talk about the area that’s also known as South Westland, I’ll describe the West Coast’s historical importance to Māori as the source of pounamu, also known as greenstone or New Zealand jade.
The West Coast of the South Island is known in Māori as Te Tai Poutini, the coast of Poutini, a tāniwha or water-monster that swam up and down the coast.
But this coast is also known in whole or part as Te Wai Pounamu, or the waters of greenstone. Indeed, the West Coast bestows this name on the whole of the South Island as well.
For the Māori have long extracted the semi-precious substance known as pounamu, also known in Australia and New Zealand as greenstone, from the mountain torrents of the West Coast. The mineral was then traded all over New Zealand, the land that would eventually come to be known in its totality to Māori as Aotearoa, by waka (canoe) and by way of the ara pounamu or greenstone trails, many of which blazed the course followed by later roads and tramping tracks.
Scientifically speaking, pounamu is made from two minerals, nephrite and bowenite. Nephrite is one of the minerals that is classified, outside of New Zealand, as jade. Most pounamu objects are made from nephrite, and thus from jade. In New Zealand, nephrite mostly occurs in the form of heavy boulders that accumulate in mountain streams, above all on the west coast of the South Island.
In either case, pounamu is generally green and translucent and capable of being carved into beautiful ornaments as well (in the past) some utilitarian items like fish-hooks, where the greater toughness of nephrite, as compared to other forms of stone, was useful. Of course, pounamu makes even fish-hooks look beautiful, in ways that their steel replacements are not.
Here’s a portrait of one celebrated nineteenth century rangatira, or chief, holding his ceremonial mere (pronounced mereh) of office, a flattened club which is quite sharp at the broad end, like an axe-head. Around his neck the rangatira wears a hei tiki, or humanoid pendant. Both artifacts are made of pounamu.
By law, the extraction, carving and sale of pounamu is controlled by Māori; specifically the Ngāi Tahu iwi of Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa.
Such artifacts are not unique to New Zealand. Wherever jade or something like has existed, it has been carved into esteemed objects. For instance, many cultures, including those of Europe, have created so-called cult axes' that resemble the Māori mere. The following cult axe was found in England, and is known to have been made from Italian jadeite, a combination of facts that suggests the existence of a network of greenstone trails quite similar to those that would later exist in Aotearoa.
Here is a useful summary on Te Ara, the online Encyclopaedia of New Zealand: teara.govt.nz/en/pounamu-jade-or-greenstone.
South of Ross, we are now starting to get into a part of the country where the hand of European colonisation and even the presence of the Māori, save for gathering pounamu, has only been lightly felt. In fact, all the National Parks from Aoraki/Mount Cook southward are part of Te Wāhipounamu/South-West New Zealand World Heritage Area. Te Wāhipounamu means 'the place of pounamu'. The national parks are Westland Tai Poutini, Aoraki/Mount Cook, Mount Aspiring and Fiordland; and land in this part of the country is more likely to be in a national park than not
The coast road heads inland, as the true coast is now wild and swampy, with lowland forest and lagoons. There will be no more seaports to compare with Westport, Greymouth or even Hokitika; only the small fishing settlement of Jackson Bay just north of the roadless wilderness of Fiordland.
The most significant place that a traveller comes to, south of Hari Hari, is the road that turns down to the tiny coastal settlement of Ōkarito and the huge, ecologically significant lagoon of the same name.
There is a campground at Ōkārito, and it’s not a bad place to stay, in part because the region’s extreme average rainfall drops mainly in the hills and on the mountains.
South of Ōkārito we come to Lake Mapourika, which reflects the local scenery, and the townships of Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier on the now-inland road. Both towns are named after their namesake glaciers, which descend, famously, through rainforest to a surprisingly low altitude.
At Fox Glacier, you can turn off down the Cook River toward Gillespies Beach. Part-way to the beach there is a side road to Lake Matheson, a small but famous scenic lake which has a walking track around it and a café, and a great view of the mountains and tall rain forest nearby when it isn’t cloudy or misty or raining. When it is, the tops of the trees loom impressively out of the mist. The track around the lake also branches off to the more elevated Lake Gault. At Gillespies Beach there is a campsite, and it seems like a great place to get away from it all.
(See DOC’s page on the Lake Matheson/Te Ara Kairaumati Walk.)
South of Fox Glacier we come to the Karangarua River and the Copland Track, which leads to Welcome Flat and its hot pools and then on to the Copland Pass, which leads in turn to Aoraki/Mount Cook. The track, the pass and the tributary of the Karangarua River that bears the same name are pronounced Copeland, not cop-land as in the American film Copland.
I talk about a hike to the Welcome Flat hot pools in this post.
After the Karangarua River, the main road (State Highway 6) briefly veers back to the actual coastline at Bruce Bay, and then inland once again past Lake Paringa where there’s a salmon farm and salmon farm café. If you’re lucky you might get to see the rare white heron or kotuku, which is seldom seen in other parts of New Zealand—Māori legend had it that you saw the kotuku only once in a lifetime—but which is drawn to the salmon farm. I wonder why? I talk about an incident in which a kotuku dropped in to see me at Paringa, in this post.
South of Paringa, the road rejoins the coastline at Knights Point, where there is a great lookout over wild cliffs, and then, not long after that, you get to Haast, the turnoff to the Haast Pass, the route to Wānaka and Queenstown.
At Haast, you can take in the Ship Creek Walk and Monro Beach, which lead through rare low-lying kahikatea swamp forest to the beach. Between July and December you might see Fiordland crested penguins, and you might see Hectors dolphins too. A second half-hour walk leads to a dune lake, through stunted coastal forest. There are viewing platforms from which to take photographs over Lake Mataketake to the sweeping coastline that leads to Jackson Head.
See the DOC pages on 'Walks north of Haast township' and Ship Creek area, of which the latter has a sweeping aerial photo by the celebrated landscape photographer Andris Apse as its hero image.
You can then continue along the coast road to the fishing settlement of Jackson Bay and a four-wheel drive road up the Jackson River, which leads via the Martyr Saddle (wonderful names!) to a track down the Cascade River. And that’s basically the end of the line.
If you take the Haast Pass road inland, which is the main road of course, it turns out that there are several tracks which lead off this road even before you get to the pass, also known as Tioripatea, itself. Perhaps the biggest walk that comes off the Haast Pass/Tioripatea Highway west of the pass is the walk that leads up the Landsborough Valley, a really big valley like something out of some Western and a typical product of glacier country. And finally, if you are coming this way,check out the blue pools at Makarora, though that’s past the Haast Pass summit and so I talk about them in a further post, 'From Haast to Wānaka'.
Here is a comprehensive list of my other posts on the South Island's West Coast (not including Fiordland)
The Heaphy Track and the Old Ghost Road
Welcome Flat: The Best Hot Pools
The Lovely Lewis Pass and Maruia Valley
Karamea: A Road Trip to the top of the South Island's West Coast
My Latest Heaphy Hike (and a flight back over the Dragons Teeth)
Greymouth and Westport: The Heart of the Coast
'The Town of Light': Reefton and the Kirwans Track
Additional Resource
See,also,
(This post was updated in October 2021. The update consisted of the inclusion of more information about Hokitika, including photographs taken the previous month.)
If you liked the post above, check out my new book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.
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