Introduction Christchurch doesn’t immediately read as a hiking destination. It’s a flat city on a flat plain, still putting itself back together after the earthquakes, and the hills that frame it to the east are easy to overlook when you’re...
Introduction Wanaka operates on a different register to Queenstown. Queenstown wants to accelerate you — bungee you, jet-boat you, send you off a ledge at speed and sell you the photographs. Wanaka, forty minutes up the road, wants you to slow down, look at the lake,...
Introduction There’s an interpretive sign at the Franz Josef Glacier lookout that politely, clearly, and with considerable scientific restraint, explains that future generations will likely have to walk farther up the valley to see the glacier at all. It sits in...
Introduction New Zealand has a talent for making you feel specifically, personally victimised by its weather. Not in a malicious way — more in the way a cat ignores you while being perfectly friendly to everyone else in the room. The mountains are right there. They...
Introduction At some point during your first look at Hokitika Gorge, you will instinctively reach for your phone to check whether the camera’s colour settings are doing something unusual. They are not. The water is actually that colour. That specific, saturated,...
Introduction New Zealand is not a country that struggles to impress. After a week on the West Coast you’ve seen glaciers, impossible turquoise gorges, mirror lakes reflecting snowcapped peaks, and beaches made of black iron-sand under dramatic storm skies. The...
