The key fob for the campervan came attached to a laminated card showing a cartoon sheep giving a thumbs up. I signed four forms, sat through a video about grey water tanks, and was handed a vehicle that smelled like diesel, industrial carpet cleaner, and the faint ghost of every fry-up cooked in it before I got there. The depot outside Christchurch was all gravel and low grey cloud, the kind that doesn’t commit to raining but keeps the sky looking like brushed steel. I loaded a bag of groceries into a cupboard that had clearly been designed by someone who had never met a real saucepan, then pulled out onto the road heading west.
Christchurch itself is worth more than the transit stop most campervan itineraries give it. The central city is still visibly patchworked — empty lots turned into pocket gardens, a cardboard cathedral that has somehow become permanent, new buildings wedged between older ones with gaps where the gaps shouldn’t be. I walked through the Botanic Gardens in a light drizzle that made the roses smell stronger than they had any right to, and ate a pie from a bakery that had a handwritten sign apologising for the queue. Then I drove. The Canterbury Plains flatten out into something almost aggressively geometric — irrigation booms, shelterbelts, more sheep than I could reasonably count — and then, without much warning, the land folds upward and you’re climbing.
The road into Arthur’s Pass is one of those drives where you keep wanting to stop and then realise the next bend is better. I pulled over at a lookout near the top of the gorge and stood there in a wind that came straight off the snow, eating a slightly squashed sandwich and watching a kea work methodically through the rubber trim on a nearby car’s windscreen. It had already half-destroyed a wiper. The driver was standing a few metres away with the resigned expression of someone who had been warned and had not fully believed the warning. Kea, for the record, are not cute. They are intelligent, destructive, and entirely aware of what they’re doing.
The alpine village at Arthur’s Pass is small enough that you can walk it in twenty minutes, which is roughly what I did before dinner. A few houses, a lodge or two, a shop, and the sound of water everywhere — a stream behind the campsite, a bigger river below the road, and somewhere above the treeline a waterfall I could hear but not see. The campsite charged me a little under twenty dollars for an unpowered site, which felt reasonable for a spot where the night sky is genuinely dark enough to see stars between the peaks. It rained properly overnight. The van’s roof made a noise like someone drumming their fingers on a cardboard box, and I slept better than I had in weeks.
Devil’s Punchbowl Falls was the first walk the next morning, and it’s short — maybe an hour return if you stop to look at things, which you will. The track climbs steadily through beech forest that smells of wet leaf litter and cold stone, and there are moments where the mist moves and the falls appear and disappear in the same breath. The spray soaks you if you stand at the top viewing platform long enough, and the sound is loud enough to make conversation pointless. I met a woman on the way down, a local who was walking the track for what she described as the hundredth time, and she told me the falls were “the easy one — the good ones, you have to earn.” Then she kept walking before I could ask which ones she meant.
A pair of kea turned up on the drive across to the West Coast, on a fencepost near the Otira Viaduct, and I pulled over to watch them tear at a discarded wrapper. The road tunnels through the mountains and spits you out into a different climate entirely — suddenly it’s damp and green and the trees are wearing moss like overcoats, moss on everything, so thick in places you can’t see the bark underneath it. The transition is abrupt enough that I actually said something out loud in the van, alone, to no one.
Hokitika is the kind of town that looks unpromising from the main road and then quietly wins you over. The beach is the thing — a long grey sweep of sand piled with driftwood, enormous silvered logs stacked by tides into something that looks almost architectural. People have made things out of it. There’s a driftwood sculpture on the beach, weathered and slightly absurd, and further along someone has spelled out a name in white stones that will be gone by the next big tide. I walked the beach for an hour in my sandals and regretted it within ten minutes, because the sand there is coarse and cold and gets into everything.
The greenstone galleries along the main street are worth an hour of anyone’s time, but the one that stuck with me was a small workshop where a carver was working a piece of pounamu with a tool that made a sound like a dentist’s drill. He told me the stone had come from a riverbed somewhere a few hours south, and that he’d been cutting it for most of his life. “You don’t rush it,” he said. “You make a mistake, the stone’s gone. There’s no gluing it back.” I bought a small pendant for thirty-five dollars, which I later understood was cheap for the work involved, and I have worn it every day since.
Franz Josef the next day was the part of the trip I had the most complicated feelings about. The glacier is genuinely extraordinary — you walk up a valley carved by ice and the moraine walls tower above you like the sides of a quarry — but it’s also clearly retreating, and the signs along the track mark where the ice used to reach in years not that long ago. There is a certain amount of collective quiet at the viewing area, people taking photos and then just standing there looking at the thing itself, grey-white and fissured and visibly smaller than it is in the old photographs on the signs. The valley walk takes a couple of hours return if you go all the way to the terminal face, and the wind coming down off the ice is cold enough that you’ll want a jacket even in summer. A woman beside me at the barrier said she’d first come in the nineties and couldn’t get over how far back the ice had gone; she said it flatly, not as a lesson, and then went back to her camera.
The hot pools at Franz Josef, by contrast, were a welcome dose of the unsubtle. Three pools of varying temperatures, a bit of steam, a view of the rainforest, and a crowd of people all doing the same thing — sitting in hot water with the expression of people who have been walking all day. I stayed until my fingers went wrinkled. The campsite that night was tucked into the rainforest, and the sound of it — bellbirds somewhere above, water dripping off the ferns, the occasional rumble of a possum on the roof — was worth more than any hotel I’ve stayed in. It also rained again. That’s the West Coast.
Fox Glacier the next day is the quieter sibling, and Lake Matheson is the reason most people stop. The reflections are the draw — on a still day the water holds the peaks like a mirror, and there are dozens of people with tripods waiting for the wind to drop. I went early, got a decent reflection for about four minutes, and then the wind picked up and the whole thing turned to grey chop. The walk around the lake takes about an hour and a half and the forest along the way is worth the trip on its own — dense, dark, and full of the sound of things moving that you never quite see.
The beach drive near Fox is where the trip got strange in a good way. The road runs along the coast for a stretch, and at one point there’s a spot where you can pull off and walk onto a black sand beach that stretches away into mist. I stood there for a while, watching the surf roll in, and a man walking his dog stopped to tell me the fishing had been bad all week. “Too much rain,” he said, gesturing at the sky as if it were personally responsible. “Comes down off the hills and muddies the water. Fish don’t like it.” He wished me a good trip and walked on, and I sat on a driftwood log for a while feeling like I had somehow stumbled into the right version of the day.
By the time I pulled into the campsite outside Fox, the van smelled of wet wool and coffee and I had stopped noticing any of it. The trick to this kind of trip, I’d worked out by then, is to stop treating the van as a vehicle and start treating it as a small, slightly damp, mobile room that happens to have a view. I ate pasta out of a pot, listened to the rain start again, and looked at the map for tomorrow’s drive south.
📷 Photos: Lisha Riabinina (Unsplash), Danny Postma (Unsplash)
