The place was Martins Bay, and this scene — seals, forests, snow-capped mountains and a raging sea — was our reward for a two-day hike along the Hollyford Track, through the forests and glacier-carved valleys of New Zealand’s South Island.
New Zealand is packed with staggering scenery. In an area just slightly larger than Britain, New Zealand has wild rivers, glaciers, forested lakes, palmy islands, fiords and a couple of dozen mountains that top 10,000ft.
North Island’s virtue is concision. If you only have 10 days to cram in a smorgasbord of adventures, North Island is your cup of adrenaline. But the call of the wild comes loudest from South Island.
Before you saddle up and gallop off into the wilds, a little pillow talk. From the palmy, balmy Bay of Islands on North Island to the frosty frontiers of Fiordland on South Island, New Zealand has the world’s finest collection of sporting lodges. It has raised the small, upmarket lodge to an art form.
On North Island, a three-hour drive south of Auckland, near where the city of Rotorua fleshes out its spurting, hissing thermal wonders lies Treetops Lodge & Estate, a Hemingway-esque affair on a 2,500-acre wilderness reserve, sunk in the sort of scenery you’d happily have as a screensaver. Further south, near the point where the Waikato River pours into Lake Taupo, Huka Lodge set the standard for the country’s lodges 20 years ago.
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A 90-minute drive south of Taupo, the Tongariro Crossing is a cracker, a one-day trek through an open wound in the Earth’s crust. The fused rocks, lava bombs and pumice along the trail are straight from the vulcanologist’s textbook, but the crowds love it. Escape from the herd by climbing to the 7,516ft summit of Mount Ngauruhoe, where for every step up, your boot slides back half a pace on loose pellets of rock. It’s worth the effort. Book in for a night either side of the walk at the Bayview Chateau Tongariro, a sprawling, neo-Georgian stately pile. In a country where lodge rates can make your eyes water, the price is a refreshing change.
To the west of Tongariro, the Whanganui River carves a passage through steep-sided green hills and terraced fields that were once cultivated by Maori settlers. The Whanganui is the country’s finest canoe touring river. The 56-mile, three-day journey from Whakahoro to Pipiriki, through Whanganui national park, is the scenic heart of the matter. This is a trip for everyman. High-end trips have guides who set up c for others, it’s a DIY adventure.
The essential introduction to South Island is the Interislander Ferry trip from Wellington to Picton. For the latter part of the crossing, set yourself up on the front deck for a prime view of the Marlborough Sounds — a series of river valleys that were submerged when the sea rose at the end of the last Ice Age — one of New Zealand’s maritime marvels.
The best way to explore the Sounds is by sea kayak, on a camping expedition with one of the local adventure-tour operators. On a sunny day, paddling past basking seals and colonies of squawking gannets with a bottle of Marlborough sauvignon blanc stowed in your hatch, this is paddling with the gods. The Sounds’ 940 miles of shoreline also means that its waters and campsites are gloriously uncrowded, unlike the popular Abel Tasman national park, another paddlers’ paradise further to the west.
This northern coast of South Island has wineries, beaches, trout streams, forests and slowly winding roads — which make it ideal for cycle touring. Local adventure operators offer guided tours with vehicle support from the north-coast city of Nelson.
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In the moist hills to the south of Nelson, mountain ranges spawn rivers that scream “trout”. The average catch for brown trout here is 3lb-6lb, and 10lb fish are not unknown. Sporting lodges in the area include The Lodge at Paratiho Farms, one of the finest. If its £824 all-inclusive nightly rate causes you momentary anxiety, Maruia River Lodge is a fine alternative.
South Island’s west coast is a place of violent extremes, where the annual rainfall is measured in metres and hiking in the forest is like walking on a sponge. Glaciers have no business occurring at sea level at this latitude, about the same distance from the equator as St Tropez, yet Westland national park is home to more than 60 glaciers. The reason is the Southern Alps, which rise to 11,482ft close to the coast, and their enormous snowfalls.
You can fly over the glaciers, land on them, hike on them, ski down them and even make a white-water rafting descent of the Waiho River where it emerges from the base of the Franz Josef glacier. For walking, take the Fox Glacier Helihike, which choppers hikers to a flat section of the ice mammoth.
Just south of the glaciers, on a riverbank where the Moeraki River begins its final dash to the sea, Wilderness Lodge Lake Moeraki is a window on the splendours of the southwest — a world of fur seals, crested penguins, thousand-year-old trees and beaches strewn with greenstone, the Maori jade.
Queenstown is New Zealand’s adventure headquarters. Here, too, are alpine hiking trails — most are available as guided walks. They don’t get much better than the 20-mile Routeburn, but the most illustrious of all is the Milford Track, a 33-mile, four-day dazzler that begins with a launch trip across Lake Te Anau, then climbs into forests of Antarctic beech. The main drawback of the Milford Track is its popularity. At the peak of the hiking season, close to 50 hikers will set off together.
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By comparison, there were just five of us, including the guide, on the three-day Hollyford walk. It’s a honeyed expedition, much of it beneath an arch of red and silver beech, rimu, totara and kotukutuku, the world’s largest fuchsia. The Hollyford guided hike includes a cruise on the Sound. This is your dessert — with glaciers dribbling from the mountain peaks and thundering waterfalls, cavorting dolphins — and, of course, those seals.
Getting there