Introduction Most people who fly into Christchurch never hear the name Godley Head. It sits at the far end of the Port Hills, past Sumner and Taylors Mistake, guarding the entrance to Lyttelton Harbour with a working lighthouse on one side and a warren of crumbling...
Introduction The Grand Canyon Track Blue Mountains walk is the reason most visitors make the trip out here in the first place. The Blue Mountains rise about ninety minutes west of Sydney, and the first thing you should know about them is that they are not, in fact,...
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...
