Some 120km south of Fox Glacier, Haast crouches around the mouth of the wide Haast River in three distinct pockets: Haast Junction, Haast Village and Haast Beach. After the jaw-dropping scenery of the glaciers or Haast Pass, the area is a functional service hub, but local operators are waiting on your call to transport you [...]
Welcome to the ‘Big Smoke’ of Westland. Crouched at the mouth of the Grey River (early European settlers had a lot of stuff to name, OK?), the West Coast’s largest town has a proud gold-mining history, and a legacy of occasional river floods, now somewhat alleviated by a flood wall.
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From Murchison, an alternative to the SH6 coast route is to turn off at Inangahua Junction and travel inland across winding valley roads via Reefton, and over the mountains into the Grey Valley.
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Great Barrier (Aotea) is the largest island in the gulf (285 sq km) and NZ’s fourth-largest behind North, South and Stewart Islands. It’s rugged and scenic, resembling the Coromandel Peninsula to which it was once joined. Named by Captain James Cook, Great Barrier Island later became a whaling, mining and logging centre, but all these [...]
Set in achingly beautiful surroundings, postage-stamp-sized Glenorchy is the perfect low-key antidote to the hype and bustle of Queenstown. An expanding range of adventure operators will get you active on the lake and in nearby mountain valleys by kayak, horse or jetboat, but if you prefer to strike out on two legs, tiny Kinloch just [...]
Gizzy to her friends, Gisborne’s a pretty thing and increasingly self-confident. Squeezed between surf beaches and a sea of chardonnay, most Kiwis would describe the lifestyle here as ‘not bad’ – meaning, of course, bloody brilliant.
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The early Maori knew Franz Joseph as Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere (Tears of the Avalanche Girl). Legend tells of a girl losing her lover who fell from the local peaks, and her flood of tears freezing into the glacier.
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Not a shy and retiring type, Sir William Fox was NZ’s prime minister when he named the river of ice in 1872. Even if you’ve already been to Franz Josef Glacier, it’s still worth checking out Fox. Take a walk around beautiful Lake Matheson, and dive into Fox’s array of glacier-related attractions: glacier walks, flights [...]
The bottom end of the South Island has some of the country’s most spectacular landscape. To the west is Fiordland National Park, with jagged misty peaks, glistening lakes and an air of forbidding remoteness. The park can be accessed via the world-famous Milford Track, one of the various trails that meander through dense forests and [...]
Fiordland is NZ’s rawest wilderness area, a jagged, mountainous, forested zone sliced by numerous deeply recessed sounds (which are technically fiords) reaching inland like crooked fingers from the Tasman Sea. Part of the Te Wahipounamu Southwest New Zealand World Heritage Area, it remains, for the most part, formidable and remote. Te Anau and Milford Sound [...]