New Zealand’s South Island by van, from Kaikōura to Milford Sound

The great South Island loop

On the South Island, the road is often empty. You drive on the left, cross one-lane bridges and stop in the evening by a lake. In a single day, you leave the Tasman Sea and its rainforest for the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers. The seventeen-day loop starts in Christchurch and goes round the island.

Wildlife is a good part of the trip. At Kaikōura, boats go out to see sperm whales. At Arthur’s Pass, kea, mountain parrots, circle around the cars. In the Catlins and on the Otago Peninsula, you look out for penguins and albatrosses.

The Southern Alps are crossed by passes, such as Lewis Pass and its beech forests. Wānaka, Queenstown and their lakes lie among dry, golden hills. The Milford Road leads to Milford Sound, and the Lake Pukaki road to the foot of Aoraki / Mount Cook.

The island is crossed by the Alpine Fault, the boundary between the Pacific and Australian plates. They slide past each other by nearly four centimetres a year, and their pressure pushes up the Southern Alps. Aoraki / Mount Cook, their highest peak, is 3,724 metres high.

At Punakaiki, the Pancake Rocks are layers of limestone, hard and soft, hollowed out by erosion: they look like stacks of pancakes. At high tide, the swell shoots up through blowholes. In the Catlins, at Curio Bay, the stumps of a petrified forest about 180 million years old appear at low tide.

Māori names and legends

In Māori, the South Island is called Te Waipounamu, often translated as “the waters of pounamu”, the green stone still carved in Hokitika. Since a 1998 law in favour of the Ngāi Tahu, many places officially have two names, one Māori, the other English: Aoraki / Mount Cook, Haast Pass / Tioripatea.

According to tradition, Aoraki and his brothers were travelling by canoe when it ran aground on a reef; a cold wind turned them to stone. The canoe became the island, the brothers the Southern Alps. Franz Josef Glacier is called Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere, “the tears of Hine Hukatere”, a young woman who wept for her lover. At Moeraki, so they say, the round boulders are the baskets of a wrecked canoe.

What not to miss

1. 1Milford SoundThe fiord by boat out to the sea, beneath Mitre Peak, nearly 1,700 metres high.
2. 2The sperm whales of KaikōuraAn undersea canyon brings them in close to the coast.
3. 3The Hooker Valley TrackTen kilometres return to a glacial lake facing Aoraki, best done early in the morning.
4. 4The albatrosses of Taiaroa HeadThe only albatross colony in the Southern Hemisphere on the mainland.
5. 5Lake TekapoThe Church of the Good Shepherd by the water, and a starry sky protected since 2012.
6. 6The Kawarau BridgeThe world’s first commercial bungy jumping site, 43 metres above the river.

The South Island in pictures

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The layers of limestone of the Pancake Rocks, above the Tasman Sea.

The food of the South Island

Kaikōura means roughly “crayfish meal”, and crayfish is eaten along this coast. On the West Coast, in spring, people catch whitebait, tiny fish served as fritters. Around Twizel, salmon is farmed in the hydro canals.

The lamb comes from Canterbury and Otago. Central Otago makes pinot noir, around Gibbston and Bannockburn. In Dunedin, people drink Speight’s, a beer brewed in the city since the 19th century.