New Zealand’s South Island

There are places you visit because of one famous monument, one beautiful beach or one historic city.

New Zealand’s South Island is different.

Here, the journey between destinations can be as beautiful as the destinations themselves.

You can wake beside a turquoise lake, drive beneath snow-covered mountains, walk through an alpine valley in the afternoon and end the day in a small town surrounded by scenery that looks almost too perfect to be real.

If I had to choose one part of the world for a traveller who loves nature, road trips and adventure, the South Island would be extremely difficult to beat.

The Road Trip Is Part of the Experience

One of the best ways to understand the South Island is by road.

The island is divided by the Southern Alps, a mountain chain whose snow-covered peaks feed glaciers and clear rivers. The mountains also create remarkably different landscapes: the West Coast is wet and covered with lush vegetation, while areas farther east can feel much drier and more open.

That means the scenery can completely change within a few hours.

You may start the morning beside a lake, drive through mountain passes and eventually reach rainforest or rugged coastline.

This is not the kind of road trip where you spend the entire journey asking, “How much longer until we arrive?”

You keep stopping.

For photographs.

For coffee.

For another viewpoint that looked too beautiful to drive past.

Queenstown: Adventure With a View

Queenstown is probably the South Island’s most famous adventure town.

It sits beside Lake Wakatipu with mountains rising dramatically behind it.

The setting alone would be enough to make Queenstown worth visiting, but the town has built an entire identity around adventure.

Bungee jumping, jet boating, skiing, mountain biking and hiking are all available around the region.

But you do not need to throw yourself from a bridge to enjoy Queenstown.

Walk beside the lake in the evening, take a drive towards Glenorchy or simply find somewhere overlooking the mountains and sit there.

Queenstown works because it can be energetic when you want adventure and peaceful when you do not.

Then Comes Aoraki / Mount Cook

Drive towards Aoraki / Mount Cook and the landscape becomes increasingly dramatic.

Lake Pukaki appears beside the road with its unusual blue colour, and beyond it rises Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain at 3,724 metres.

Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park is New Zealand’s premier alpine region. Glaciers cover roughly 40 percent of the park, surrounded by glacier-carved valleys and some of the country’s highest peaks.

You do not have to be a mountaineer to experience it.

Walking tracks allow ordinary visitors to move through valleys surrounded by enormous peaks.

This is where New Zealand begins to feel almost unreal.

There are moments when clouds move away from the mountains and suddenly expose walls of snow and rock above you.

Everyone stops talking.

Sometimes a landscape does not require an explanation.

Milford Sound Is the Grand Finale

Then there is Milford Sound / Piopiotahi.

Calling it beautiful hardly seems enough.

Dark water stretches between enormous mountains that rise almost vertically from the fjord. Waterfalls fall from cliffs, clouds wrap themselves around the peaks and boats look tiny against the scale of the landscape.

Milford Sound receives enormous amounts of rain, but that is not necessarily bad news for travellers. After rainfall, countless temporary waterfalls begin pouring down the surrounding cliffs. Lady Bowen Falls and Stirling Falls flow year-round.

A cruise through Milford Sound is probably one of those travel experiences where bad weather can actually improve the scenery.

Rain creates mist.

Mist creates waterfalls.

And suddenly the entire fjord feels wild.

The area also supports wildlife including bottlenose dolphins and the rare Fiordland crested penguin.

For hikers, Fiordland goes even further. The region contains the Milford, Kepler and Routeburn Tracks, three of New Zealand’s celebrated Great Walks.

The Lakes Deserve Their Own Journey

The South Island seems almost unfairly rich in lakes.

Lake Tekapo is famous for its brilliant blue water and surrounding mountains.

Lake Pukaki provides extraordinary views towards Aoraki.

Lake Wakatipu gives Queenstown much of its character.

Farther north, the scenery changes again around places such as Nelson and Abel Tasman, where golden beaches replace the giant mountains of the south. New Zealand’s official tourism site highlights Nelson, Golden Bay and Abel Tasman National Park among the island’s outstanding beach destinations.

That variety is what keeps a South Island trip interesting.

It never feels like you are simply looking at different versions of the same landscape.

A Place That Makes You Slow Down

Modern travel can become strangely competitive.

See five attractions today.

Drive somewhere tomorrow.

Take the photograph.

Move on.

The South Island encourages the opposite.

You begin stopping the car simply because the light on a mountain has changed.

You spend twenty minutes beside a lake without doing anything.

You realize the road ahead is beautiful enough that arriving one hour later really does not matter.

And perhaps that is the reason I would place New Zealand’s South Island among the best places in the world to travel.

It does not give you only one spectacular attraction.

It gives you hundreds of small moments between them.

A lonely road beneath the Southern Alps.

Morning mist above a lake.

A waterfall appearing from the clouds at Milford Sound.

Snow turning pink during sunset.

By the end of the journey, your camera will probably contain thousands of photographs.

But the strongest memory may be much simpler:

Looking through the window somewhere in the middle of nowhere and wondering how one island managed to fit so much beauty into such a small part of the world.