South Island Road Trip — Mount Cook, Milford Sound, Queenstown and the Catlins

I booked my bus ticket the day before I left Christchurch along with my hostel — it was the weekend before ski season opened and Queenstown was beginning to fill up. The bus left at 10am and the scenery just got better and better by the minute. This is one of those journeys where you genuinely do not mind the hours passing because there is always something worth looking at through the window.

Lake Tekapo

The bus stopped at Lake Tekapo for a driver changeover and I jumped out and ran around snapping pictures like crazy. Lake Tekapo has got to be one of the most beautiful places I have been anywhere. The lake is an extraordinary milky turquoise colour — glacial flour suspended in the water — sitting against a backdrop of the Southern Alps. The Church of the Good Shepherd on the lakeshore is one of the most photographed buildings in New Zealand and the view from here across the lake to the mountains is the kind of thing that stops you in your tracks.

The bus continued onwards through Wanaka — we arrived just as the sun went down which was disappointing — and on into Queenstown as evening settled over the mountains.

One of the big decisions of the Queenstown leg was whether to do Milford Sound. The price gave me pause. The distance — a five hour drive each way — gave me further pause. And then I asked myself the question that settled it: would I regret not going if I never came back to New Zealand?

The answer was yes. So I went.

I booked the Juicy Cruiser with the coach transfer to make life easier — the coach handles the driving and stops at key viewpoints along the way through Fiordland National Park. I met two amazing sisters that morning on the coach and we spent the day together. The five hour drive to Milford Sound was stunning in its own right — the road through Fiordland passes Mirror Lakes, the Avenue of the Disappearing Mountain and the Homer Tunnel before descending into the fiord itself.

And then we reached Milford Sound. There are no words adequate for it. I had never seen anything like it — coming from a small island in the Caribbean, the scale of the fiord walls rising vertically from the water on both sides, the waterfalls dropping hundreds of metres directly into the sea, the silence and the mist. A picture is worth a thousand words but even pictures do not really capture it. You have to be there.

The boat cruise out through the fiord to the Tasman Sea and back is the right way to experience it. We hopped back on the coach for a sunset drive back to Queenstown — a long day by any measure — and went out for drinks anyway because Queenstown at night is not something to sleep through.

Technically I had been in Queenstown for over 24 hours by the time I actually saw it. The morning after the Milford Sound day I walked through the botanical gardens alone, just taking in the extraordinary setting. Queenstown is a quaint ski town surrounded by mountains on every side — the Remarkables range to the south, the Coronet Peak range to the north — and every view from every street corner is the kind of thing that should not exist this close to a town centre. It was immediately one of my favourite places in New Zealand.

I arrived just before ski season opened which I was slightly sad about — I would have loved to learn to ski here. If skiing is your thing, night skiing in Queenstown is supposed to be extraordinary. Put it on the list for a return trip.

That afternoon my sister flew in and we made plans for a spontaneous road trip south. We could not leave the adventure capital of the world without doing something properly adventurous first. Read the full guide: 20 Things to Do in Queenstown.

Just to be clear — I am scared of heights. My original plan was the Kawarau Bridge jump as a first-time bungy experience. My sister had other ideas and convinced me to do Nevis instead. Nevis is 134 metres. It is the highest bungy jump in New Zealand. This is what I agreed to.

Probably one of the scariest and most exhilarating things I have ever done in my life. Would I do it again? Definitely not Nevis — but maybe something smaller. The full post is here: Nevis Bungy Jump New Zealand.

I thought the bungy was bad. Then came the Nevis Swing — the world’s largest swing — which we watched four people do before our turn. Everyone said it was worse than the bungy. Fantastic.

I genuinely loved doing it with my sister. It was one of those shared experiences that becomes a permanent part of the story of a trip. From there we went to the airport to pick up the rental car — after we had gotten over the adrenaline rush, of course. For advice on driving in New Zealand as a first-timer, this guide covers it well.

We woke up super early the next morning and got moving. Wanaka appeared just after sunrise — I finally got to see this quaint lakeside town in proper daylight after the disappointing sunset arrival on the bus — and it was every bit as beautiful as its reputation. The lake, the willow trees, the mountains. Noted for next time.

From Wanaka it was a two hour drive to Mount Cook through mountain passes and a lot of fog. The South Island has a way of concealing its best views and then revealing them without warning. We reached Lake Pukaki and the fog broke and there was Mount Cook — Aoraki, the Cloud Piercer — reflected in the impossibly blue glacial lake in front of us.

We stopped, we got out, we took far too many photographs. The fog had cleared completely by the time we reached the Mount Cook village and it was a beautiful clear day for the walk around the base. New Zealand’s highest mountain standing at 3,724 metres and visible in its entirety on a clear day is something that earns every superlative thrown at it.

From Mount Cook we drove four and a half hours to Dunedin. Ambitious — yes. We made it by 6pm, found a park, checked in and found some of the best Chinese food I had in New Zealand. Sometimes the unexpected meal is the best one.

After such a long day on the road I was a little hesitant about another full day in the car. But the following day was forecast rainy and this was our only window — so we left Dunedin ridiculously early and headed out to the deep south of the South Island. The weather could not have been better. Sun blazing, actually warm, the kind of day the Catlins rarely delivers and had clearly saved just for us.

Nugget Point

The first stop was Nugget Point — a dramatic headland jutting into the Southern Ocean with a lighthouse at the tip and extraordinary rock formations in the water below. Sea lions, fur seals and sea birds. The walk out to the lighthouse takes about 20 minutes and the views back along the coastline are stunning. A perfect start to the day.

Purakaunui Falls

About 40 minutes from Nugget Point, a short walk through the native bush brings you to Purakaunui Falls — a wide, tiered waterfall that is one of the most photographed in New Zealand. We were the only people there. We took our time, took far too many selfies for the family back home and then moved on.

McLean Falls

Cathedral Caves were closed the day we visited which was disappointing. Instead we followed a road down through the back of a sheep farm — as you do in the Catlins — and found McLean Falls. A 30-minute walk one way through the forest and the falls at the end were considerably more impressive than expected. A good accidental detour.

Curio Bay

The final stop was Curio Bay — a petrified forest dating back 180 million years. Silica preserved ancient trees in place, turning them into fossils that are now visible at low tide on the beach. You can clearly see tree stumps and logs in the rock. It is an extraordinary thing to stand in front of and genuinely hard to comprehend the timescale involved. No penguins on the day we visited — yellow-eyed penguins are sometimes seen here in the evening — but the petrified forest alone was worth the stop.

The rainy day gave us a day to explore Dunedin properly and it turned out to be one of the better surprises of the South Island. The city reminded me of somewhere in Europe — beautiful old Gothic and Victorian buildings, the extraordinary Dunedin Railway Station, wide streets and a university town energy that gives it a liveliness that smaller South Island towns do not have.

I really loved Dunedin and wished I had spent more time there. The Otago Peninsula — a dramatic finger of land east of the city with albatross colonies, yellow-eyed penguins and sea lions — deserves a full day that we did not have. Noted for the return trip that is now firmly on the list.

The next morning we left at 6am for the drive back to Christchurch. A beautiful and genuinely memorable week exploring the deep south.