From Punakaiki to Wanaka

After looking at the calendar, we re-planned our trip with time allocation for each driving route, which took much longer than Google Maps suggests due to endless curves, single-lane bridges, lots of photography, and small walks here and there.

We drove along the Great Coast Road to Hokitika, where we stayed overnight at a Top10 campsite. (Originally, we planned to go until Haast and stay there for 2 days). In Hokitika, the jade processing capital, Hp visited a workshop where grinding and polishing took place, while I was more interested in the finished products and, surprisingly, found a very beautiful pendant. On the way to the glaciers, Hp was finally able to swim in Lake Lanthe (which unexpectedly wasn't icy).

The area around Franz Josef Glacier was so crowded that we continued to Fox Glacier, where it didn't get much better. Since we didn't want to take a helicopter ride to the glacier or do a skydive from an altitude of nearly 5500 m, we had dinner at 'Last Kitchen' in the evening and continued south in the morning to the remote Haast region with forests, meadows, and wetlands. Just before Haast, before heading inland, we stopped to see Ship Creek, a beautiful dune landscape. There was driftwood there, which I found very, very hard to leave behind. Then we crossed the Haast Pass, which we couldn't really recognize as such, and continued past rivers and lakes to Wanaka. Along the way, we also looked at the not really spectacular Fantail Falls and then stayed overnight at a really nice terraced campsite with incredible views. I had planned to hike up Roys Peak to take the ultimate photo of this breathtaking landscape, but it was foggy and rainy the next day, so we continued. Not to Milford Sound (about 1 million visitors per year were too much for the lonely gorge), where we had initially wanted to go, but to the Surat Bay on the east coast.