The first week on the South Island

After a week on the South Island of New Zealand, you can say - like everyone else - it's completely different here than on the North Island! There are even fewer people living here, so you often drive completely alone on the road through totally lonely areas. The landscape is spectacular! High mountains, beautiful valleys, and deep blue lakes. It's a bit like the Alps, only much lonelier and therefore even more beautiful. The weather here is very unpredictable; one day bright sunshine and 20 degrees, the next day rain and 12 degrees. The evenings and nights are bitterly cold. We have never noticed how powerful the sun is until here. When it sets in the evening, it suddenly gets cold. If you sit in the sun during the day, you burn from the front and the back of your body is icy. By now, we are coping well with the climate. We bought warm wool underwear and don't sit in front of the car and read in the evenings, but go for a walk to warm up.

When we arrived on this island, we initially wanted to drive south along the West Coast. However, the weather there was so bad that we couldn't do anything outside. We then drove across Arthur's Pass towards the east. That was a good decision and the route was incredible! In the mountain world, it was early summer, everything smelled and was full of flowers. And on top of that, the magnificent landscape!

Now we are on the east coast (the weather is better) in the area where the earth shook a few weeks ago. Today we drove along the coastal road and were very shocked to see the damage from the earthquake. Destroyed railway tracks, the guardrails on the mountain roads had slid down, deep cracks ran through the streets, some of them were protected by rows of containers from sliding slopes. It was quite frightening to drive through this region and we didn't like to think about how people must be feeling about it.

We will continue to enjoy our time here and hike a lot in this beautiful nature.