The Sensational South Island: New Zealand's Mountain Land

THE SENSATIONAL SOUTH ISLAND

New Zealand’s Mountain Land

An expanded and updated version of the second part of the 2018 award finalist, A Maverick New Zealand Way.

A companion volume, The Neglected North Island, has been judged ‘Best Antipodean Cultural Travel Book 2021’ by Lux Life magazine (lux-review.com), and has also been awarded the Bronze Medal in Australia/New Zealand/Pacific Rim – Best Regional Non-Fiction at the 2021 IPPY Awards.

TRAVELLER

MARY JANE WALKER

‘Best Antipodean Cultural Travel Book 2021’ and 2021 IPPY Awards Bronze Medallist

A few reviews of other titles by

Mary Jane Walker

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Read one of New Zealand author Mary Jane Walker’s informed and richly entertaining travel books and the thirst for more adventures leads to searching for additional volumes.

Grady Harp, Amazon Hall of Fame reviewer, from a review of A Maverick Traveller Anthology, 20 April 2019

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

‘Do take a walk with Mary Jane Walker!’

In the tradition of Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark, Isabella Bird and other adventurous women, Mary Jane Walker's relationship with the world is one of insatiable curiosity. She is driven to immerse herself in experience. I was happy to walk with Walker around the world, and was pulled in by her prose.

Brooklyn Stooptalk, from an Amazon review of A Maverick Traveller, 20 April 2018

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

‘Marvellous Information!!!!’

Just an enriching book on a place I knew very little about. I’ve always said that the purpose of reading is acquiring new knowledge & I did!

D. West, from an Amazon review of A Maverick New Zealand Way, 22 May 2019

★ ★ ★ ★

‘An Interesting Travel Memoir’

From a review of A Maverick Himalayan Way, new edition, by 'Piaras', Amazon Vine Voice reviewer, 24 May 2019

… and a further testimonial

Hey. We met for 9 years in Russia. You told me about your travels, and then I had not yet visited other countries. Now, thanks to you, I have visited 27 countries. Thanks.

Matvei Ogulov, Russian musician, in a recent Facebook message (2020).

See all Mary Jane’s books and blog on a-maverick.com

Mary Jane Walker has travelled the world and written 14 books so far, including the award finalist A Maverick New Zealand Way.

Finding herself in New Zealand during Covid has made Mary Jane get out and explore even more of her own country, and to look more deeply into its history and indigenous culture.

In The Sensational South Island, Mary Jane explores the larger but less populated of New Zealand’s two main islands, by way of eight road tours. A ninth section looks at the offshore islands of the South Island, including the remote Chathams group.

The Sensational South Island is a companion to The Neglected North Island: New Zealand’s other half, judged ‘Best Antipodean Cultural Travel Book 2021’ by Lux Life magazine (lux-review.com) and a bronze medallist in the 2021 IPPY Awards as well. 

Email: maryjanewalker@a-maverick.com

Facebook: facebook.com/amavericktraveller

Instagram: @a_maverick_traveller

Linkedin: Mary Jane Walker

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Twitter: @Mavericktravel0

a-maverick.com

First published 2021 by Mary Jane Walker

A Maverick Traveller Ltd.

PO Box 44 146, Point Chevalier, Auckland 1246

NEW ZEALAND

a-maverick.com

© 2021 Mary Jane Walker

All rights reserved. Except for the purpose of fair reviewing, no part of this publication subject to copyright may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-473-53244-4 (paperback), 978-0-473-53246-8 (Kindle), 978-0-473-53245-1 (other epubs)

Disclaimer

This book is a travel memoir, not an outdoors guide. Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at the time of publication, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. Some names have also been changed to disguise and protect certain individuals.

Notes on Image Sources

All maps and aerial views are credited with the original source. Abbreviations which may be used in image credits or otherwise are as follows:

DOC: New Zealand Department of Conservation

LINZ: Land Information New Zealand

NZDF: New Zealand Defence Forces

New Zealand Government material, for which Crown Copyright is otherwise reserved, is used here in accordance with published departmental Creative Commons licenses in force at the time of publication.

The front cover includes an Adobe stock image by Anton Balazh, used under licence.

Contents

Front Matter

Introduction

Chapter 1:      Some of my South Island Faves

Chapter 2:      The Land and its Peoples

Chapter 3:      Travel Tips

Tour 1:      The Prow

Chapter 4:      Nelson: Town of history and trees

Chapter 5:      The Coast North-West of Nelson

Chapter 6:      Kahurangi National Park

Chapter 7:      The Heaphy Track and the Old Ghost Road

Chapter 8:      Between Blenheim and Nelson

Chapter 9:      The Nelson Lakes and the Travers-Sabine Circuit

Tour 2:      The Wild West Coast

Chapter 10:      The Waters of Jade

Chapter 11:      Welcome Flat: The best hot pools

Chapter 12:      A Visitation at Paringa

Tour 3:      Arthur’s and Lewis Passes

Chapter 13:      St James Walkway and the Lewis Pass Tops

Chapter 14:      Arthur’s Pass

Tour 4:      The Urbane East Coast

Chapter 15:      Kaikōura: Eating crayfish and watching whales

Chapter 16:      Christchurch: Gateway to Antarctica, rich in heritage, recovering from crises

Chapter 17:      Banks Peninsula and the Port Hills

Chapter 18:      Timaru: Cave art downtown

Chapter 19:      ‘I can’t believe I haven’t stayed here before’: The Wonderland of Oamaru

Chapter 20:      The North Coast into Dunedin

Chapter 21:      Dunedin: the ‘Edinburgh of the South’

Tour 5:      Aoraki and the Canterbury Lakes

Chapter 22:      Canterbury Surprise: The Foothills of the Alps

Chapter 23:      Aoraki/Mount Cook: Another deadly peak

Chapter 24:      An Accessible – not inaccessible – wilderness for solo women travellers

Tour 6      Queenstown, Wānaka and the Waitaki Valley

Chapter 25:      From Haast to Wānaka

Chapter 26:      Matukituki Valley and Mount Aspiring/Tititea

Chapter 27:      French Ridge

Chapter 28:      Queenstown: Tourism Capital

Chapter 29:      Up to the Place of Light, down the Water of Tears

Tour 7:      Central Otago

Chapter 30:      Otago’s Dry Centre

Tour 8:      The Southern Scenic Realm

Chapter 31:      Milford Sound/Piopiotahi, and its Road

Chapter 32:      Tramping the Milford Track and Feeling Very Scottish

Chapter 33:      The Hollyford Track

Chapter 34:      Gertrude Saddle: A Rock Climber’s Paradise

Chapter 35:      The Romantic Routeburn

Chapter 36:      Lake Marian: Camping and looking at the Routeburn

Chapter 37:      Rees-Dart: The most beautiful glacier

Chapter 38:      Caples-Greenstone: More birds galore

Chapter 39:      Kepler Track: Just divine views

Chapter 40:      Off the Beaten Track at Manapōuri

Chapter 41:      No Doubts about Doubtful Sound

Chapter 42:      Tūātapere Hump Ridge

Chapter 43:      46 South going on 47: Invercargill and the Bluff

Chapter 44:      The Catlins: An overlooked corner of New Zealand

Chapter 45:      The Dusky Track . . . An Epic

Tour 9:      The South Island’s Other Islands

Chapter 46:      East to the Chathams

Chapter 47:      The Isle of Blushing Skies

Chapter 48:      Whenua Hou and the Few Kākāpō Left

Chapter 49:      Te Araroa: The Long Pathway

Chapter 50:      Why not Swap Hiking Boots for Biking Boots?

Conclusion

Acknowledgements and Thanks

Other Books by Mary Jane Walker

Rear Cover

The South Island in relation to the other main islands of New Zealand. The map shown is based on NASA Earth Observatory image 2010/099.

The South Island of New Zealand, with Rakiura/Stewart Island. Source: detail from the NASA Earth Observatory image 2010/099. Insert: Southern Rātā, a cooler-climate cousin of the Pōhutukawa, widespread in the South Island and much of the North Island as well. Also symbolic of Christmas and summer.

A Note on Maps and Images

If you have a copy of this book in which the images are printed in black and white, or if you have a Kindle with a black-and-white screen, you can see all of the images in this book that were originally in colour in full colour, and all of the images including chapter-specific maps generally at higher resolution, by going to the blog posts linked at the end of each chapter.

In fact, these blog posts will generally contain more images than appear in the book.

The maps that appear in this book have been drawn from a variety of sources, including two key government agencies, the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) and Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).

Unless noted or indicated otherwise, all maps, aerial photos and satellite images are shown with north at the top.

Readers are in every case urged to make use of original maps (often zoomable if online) and guides when in the outdoors; the maps and aerial/satellite images shown in this book are purely for illustration.

For a literally more all-round perspective, you might also wish to look at some of localities I describe in the 3D view on Google Earth.

Introduction

A

MONG all the wonders of the world, it’s the business of coming home and tramping (hiking) in New Zealand, a land known more poetically as Aotearoa, that I have most wanted to write about.

This book is a brief, road-trip introduction to New Zealand’s South Island, the island that is more often visited by tourists. I’ve tried to pack as much firsthand, useful experience as I can into a comparatively short book.

An island known by other names

In Māori, the South Island is also known as Te Waipounamu and also as Te-Waka-a-Māui, the canoe of Māui, by which the demigod Māui, and his brothers, fished the North Island (Te-Ika-a-Māui, Māui’s fish) out of the great ocean.

Te Waipounamu is the most common of the two Māori names, as it refers to the island’s significance as a source of pounamu, or New Zealand jade, also known locally as greenstone: a substance that lies at the centre of Māori culture.

The northern end of the South Island is also called Te Tau Ihu o te Waka-a-Māui, the Prow of Maui’s canoe. This name has been adopted by a useful local-history website called the Prow:

theprow.org.nz

A Varied Landscape

The landscape of the South Island, or Te Waipounamu, is divided into several distinct zones, which you can see in a satellite photograph.

The South Island. NASA World Wind public domain image, via: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turbid_Waters_Surround_New_Zealand_-_crop.jpg

The largest and snowiest peaks of the high mountains reflect light from permanent glaciers. Indeed, New Zealand has more than 3,000 named glaciers, nearly all of which are found in the mountains of the South Island. They are remnants of the formerly much more colossal glaciers that used to cover a quarter of the South Island in the Ice Ages, leaving scooped-out valleys and fiords, knife-edge peaks, vertical rock walls and waterfalls that plunge huge distances.

No Kiwi tourist film is complete, it seems, without the view from a helicopter speeding along Lake Quill, located in the mountains near Piopiotahi / Milford Sound, then over the edge as the waters of the lake unexpectedly plunge to the floor of a flat-bottomed valley down which the Arthur River now meanders.

West of the still-glaciated peaks there is a belt of green mountains (snowy in winter) that extends almost to the sea. Valleys hardly any wider than some of the larger rivers elsewhere are farmed in these parts, which only support a very small population save in the north. Practically nobody at all lives in the far southwest, a land of fiords and a UNESCO World Heritage conservation wilderness called Te Wāhipounamu – South West New Zealand World Heritage Area.

The highest peak in the north-east area, Tapuae-o-Uenuku, meaning footsteps of the rainbow god, is 2,885 metres or 9,465 feet high and easily visible, across the water, from the southernmost parts of the North Island.

Visible to the south of the South Island is Rakiura or Stewart Island, the country’s largest offshore island, mostly a wilderness as well.

‘We don’t know how lucky we are’

Since Covid, many Kiwis and the world are now starting to realise how lucky we are and how we should appreciate our own country more.

So, I just started hiking, walking and biking. Tramping clubs seemed overly organised to me and rather stuffy, and I eventually decided my own company was better than belonging with a group, but have Personal Locator Beacon, if you chose to go down that track.

The luckiest New Zealanders of all are those who live in the South Island. For, most of New Zealand’s national parks and other nature parks are in the South Island or on nearby Rakiura/Stewart Island.

National Parks in New Zealand

Map graphic sourced from the DOC website on 12 December 2016.

From Great Walks to Day Walks

And what are the places that you would like to visit in the South Island, and the walks you might like to do?

The Great Walks are New Zealand’s premier tramping tracks. In the South Island, from north to south, the Great Walks are:

• the Abel Tasman Coast Track

• the Heaphy Track

• the Paparoa Track

• the Routeburn Track

• the Kepler Track

• the Milford Track, and, coming in 2022,

• the Tūātapere Hump Ridge Track

On Rakiura/Stewart Island there is also the Rakiura Track.

A much longer list of short walks is provided in DOC’s list of ‘Family Friendly’ walks. This is so extensive that it’s best to go online to access the special interactive website, which has a clickable map giving a list of walks for each district:

doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/things-to-do/walking-and-tramping/family-friendly-walks-and-tramps

Many of these, including all the Great Walks, are described first-hand in the present book, along with other tracks and destinations that don’t make the DOC shortlists.

I have a list of my own favourite walks and tramps for getting off the beaten track. It follows this introduction as the first chapter of the book.

Nine Tours

In keeping with this informal, do it yourself spirit, the book is organised into eight road tours from which