This post follows up my two earlier posts about the wild Catlins region of New Zealand. I went through in a campervan at the start of June 2021. I visit the waterfalls, and list freedom camping sites. Information about freedom camping sites can be a bit hard to come by, so I have made the effort to identify all five such sites in the Catlins. I also describe other camping spots, including beautiful Pūrākaunui Bay, my favourite.

THE Lake Marian Track has lately become very popular, although tourist numbers are down at present because of Covid (so, if in NZ already, you should go there!). The track begins from Marian Carpark, one kilometre down the unsealed Hollyford Road from its intersection with the Milford Road, some ninety kilometres out from Te Anau. It now has a wooden gantry only 20 minutes in, from which you can admire the Marian Falls, which are really more like rapids. Even if you don’t do the rest of the...

The Taranaki (NZ) Around the Mountain Circuit turned into an epic for me! I only got halfway before falling into a ravine on the way north and injuring myself, so the northern side will have to be written up some other time. But meanwhile, here are some thoughts on doing the southern side. Which is what you miss out if, like a lot of people, you only tramp around the northern side of the mountain, handy to New Plymouth, where the popular Pouakai Track and (Northern) Summit Route are...

Reefton, on the West Coast of NZ’s South Island, was one of the first towns to get electric light and is the gateway to many trails today. It is the only sizable town on the West Coast that’s some way inland. The town got its start in 1871 following the discovery of a gold reef nearby, and was originally called Reef Town. To this day it’s got plenty of atmosphere (mostly smelling of coal-smoke), and is surrounded by historic mine workings.‍ The town has a lot old-time charm. The 100% New...

Hanmer Springs is a popular hot-spring resort east of the Lewis Pass in NZ’s South Island. It’s also the gateway to a wilderness. You get to Hanmer Springs by turning northward, off State Highway 7 between the Lewis Pass and Culverden. The town lies in a small plain just south of the Hanmer Range, which includes Mount Isobel and Jacks Pass. It’s a short trip from there to the historic St James Homestead, Amuri Skifield and the pretty Peters Valley, which leads into the St James Conservation...

That’s a question we need to ask in New Zealand. Should immigration targets be linked to positive spending on infrastructure and housing to cope? On last Sunday’s Q+A, most of the panel and the interviewees seemed to think that New Zealand needed a larger population, built up by immigration. Or that immigration-fuelled growth was, at any rate, inevitable. Indeed, why shouldn’t New Zealand grow its population and its cities? By the standards of many other countries, we have the room. And...

THE PAPAROA TRACK is New Zealand’s most recently-commissioned Great Walk. The track partly follows an old gold-miners’ pathway with the hopeful name of the Croesus Track. And it partly also follows a brand-new course, including the epic gorge of the Pororari River. This part of New Zealand is probably the southernmost place on earth where you will find “tropical” jungle with palm trees and giant tree ferns. It’s 42 degrees south. But intense and continual rainfall and the moderating...

THE population heartland of the South Island’s West Coast lies in the area around Greymouth and Westport, where mines in the hills are joined with a comparative abundance of flat land by West Coast standards. The plain sits west of the South Island’s gigantic Alpine Fault: a crack in the earth’s crust that runs southwest like a ruler to Fiordland, in a way that is very striking on a topopgraphical map. The coastal plain to the west of the fault is nowhere else as wide as it is in the...

Visitor numbers are up in the limestone country near Karamea, New Zealand. Which is a good thing, as it’s really worth a visit! Things to see include the incredible Ōpārara arches and Mirror Tarn, accessible from a road built by loggers decades ago when logging was still allowed. Starting out from Westport, the first place you’ll want to make a turnoff to see is the historic mining community of Denniston, on top of a low mountain some 600 metres or two thousand feet above the coast. There...

The two ends of the Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand’s ten Great Walks. are far apart. But flying back over the top is just as amazing! I’ve done the Heaphy a couple of times from the eastern end. So, this time (March 2021) I decided to go from the west, for a change, and also because I was on the West Coast already. I hastily booked a flight with a firm called Golden Bay Air, which also does scenic flights, to take me back to Karamea when I’d finished. And then I started walking from the...

This post takes a closer look at the New Zealand state’s longstanding historical unwillingness to make plans for Auckland’s growth. A COUPLE of weeks ago we blogged about “the paradox of retrenchment in the face of growth.” We wrote about how it was practically an orthodoxy some forty years ago that the populations of Auckland, and of a New Zealand of little more than three million, were not going to get much larger. And how, for that reason, the government could give up on planning for the...

Auckland Council, New Zealand’s so-called Super City administration, has become known for at least four areas of failure in a decade. Why? It’s time to question the approach of chief executives such as Jim Stabback and his predecessor Stephen Town, and their sub-chiefs in Auckland Transport, Ports of Auckland and Watercare, which all too often focuses on short-term savings and cuts. This isn’t necessarily the fault of individuals. It’s also due to the wider incentive-culture of the public...

It was my amazing luck to hike the Banks Track at the end of January, 2021. It’s on the ‘wild side’ of the rocky, volcanic Banks Peninsula. Billed on its website as New Zealand’s “original private walking track,” the Banks Track invites you to spend three nights on the remote south-eastern tip of Te Horomaka or Banks Peninsula, also known in Māori as Te Pātaka o Rakaihautū.‍ In spite of its proximity to a big city and the smaller, touristy town of Akaroa, the area through which the Banks...

AFTER my month on Rakiura/Stewart Island, I left for Whenua Hou, also known as Codfish Island, to work on track maintenance. Even in normal times, to stay on the island you have to go through quarantine, which I did in Invercargill. During the process, they checked for foreign grasses in my gear,so I had made sure to purchase new socks and wash down my pack and wet weather gear.‍ During the breeding season of the kākāpō, a rare flightless parrot that is active at night and sleeps by day, the...

THE small size of Oban belies its importance as Stewart Island’s only town and the entranceway to the North West Circuit Track where I was to be spending a few weeks volunteering as a hut warden, and also to the much shorter Rakiura Track, the southernmost of New Zealand’s official Great Walks. The Māori name for Stewart Island is Rakiura, which means ‘blushing [or glowing] skies’ and is far more poetic in my view. It seems to be a reference to long twilights in these subantarctic latitudes,...

Christchurch, New Zealand, has some amazing Lord of the Rings country to its north & west. You don’t have to go far from town to get there! Looking at just one of these areas, the Hakatere Conservation Park, it's close to Erewhon, the setting of the English writer Samuel Butler’s fictional utopia Erewhon,but also an actual place. This district includes an isolated hill with sweeping views called Mount Sunday, so-called because riders from several areas would meet up there each Sunday to...

Banks Peninsula (near Christchurch NZ) is an eroded volcano with several harbours, historic ports, wildlife, and lots of hiking trails. In its topography it resembles one of the Hawai‘ian islands, though naturally somewhat colder and bleaker. The biggest harbours on the peninsula are Lyttelton Harbour just south of Christchurch and Akaroa Harbour further east, on the south side. The peninsula has two Māori names, Horomaka (‘foiling of Maka’), a name that refers to events during an ancient...

BETWEEN Blenheim and Nelson, there is a ruggedly beautiful area that extends from the Marlborough Sounds in the north-east to Nelson Lakes National Park, in the southwest, via the Richmond Range. To the west, and south, of this great triangular block of mountains there are the river flats and plains of Nelson and, on the Blenheim side, the Wairau valley. Ironically, though Nelson and Blenheim are not far apart, the Richmond Range is a formidable barrier, as is its seaward continuation in the...

NELSON is a lovely, leafy city at the top end of the South Island of New Zealand. It has a sunny climate, lots of old buildings both in wood and stone, and a frankly amazing abundance of hiking trails in the hills that overlook the town.‍ The locality on which Nelson was established is known in Māori as Wakatu or Whakatū: names that look and sound similar but don’t mean the same thing. All the same, Wakatu or Whakatū is routinely used as the Māori name for the modern city of Nelson. Lots of...

With an abundance of gothic stone architecture and a large pedestrian area, Christchurch, New Zealand, is like a quaint old city in Europe. Indeed, I never get sick of visiting the thriving metropolis of Christchurch, or Ōtautahi, which is in fact now the largest city in the South Island, its current population about 420,000 overall. Much of its heritage has, thankfully, survived the earthquakes of a decade ago. The river that runs through the city, named the Avon by the colonists, not...