The rain on the Milford Road didn’t start gradually. It arrived somewhere between the Homer Tunnel and the first big waterfall, as if a tap had been turned on somewhere above the valley and nobody remembered to shut it off. We’d left Queenstown before dawn, the campervan’s windscreen wipers already working overtime, and by the time we reached the tunnel approach, the water was sheeting across the road in waves that made the surface look like a shallow river. A tour bus ahead of us slowed to a crawl, its hazard lights blinking through the spray. We were one of maybe a dozen vehicles making this drive, and the road felt far too narrow. Far too narrow for all of us.
Milford Sound in heavy rain is one of those experiences that travel guides, paradoxically, will tell you to hope for. The reasoning is simple: the more it rains, the more waterfalls appear on the sheer rock faces flanking the fiord. Hundreds of temporary falls, each one a thin white thread against the dark stone, pouring straight down. We’d heard this from a woman at the DOC office in Te Anau two days earlier, and she’d been emphatic. “If it’s raining when you get there,” she’d said, “don’t be disappointed. That’s when it really shows off, or whatever.” We weren’t disappointed exactly, but standing on the deck of the cruise boat with our hoods up and the rain finding its way down our collars anyway, the distinction felt academic. The waterfalls were everywhere — dozens of them, hundreds, impossible to count — but so was the water falling from the sky, and the two began to blur into a single wet fact.
The boat cruise itself lasts about two hours, a slow circuit of the fiord with the captain pointing out landmarks through the PA system. Seals on a rock formation called the Seal Colony. The sheer face of Mitre Peak, visible only when the clouds lift enough to reveal it. The spot where the fiord opens out to the Tasman Sea, the water turning from dark green to steel grey. We saw none of these clearly, but we saw every waterfall, and the cumulative effect — the sound of them, the way the wind carried spray from one fall across the deck to meet another — was something no guidebook photograph could replicate. The rain let up briefly near the end, long enough to see the way the clouds sat on the peaks like a lid on a pot, and then it started again. By the time we’d driven back out through the tunnel and pulled into the Te Anau holiday park that evening, we were wet in ways that felt permanent. We hung rain jackets from every hook in the campervan and ate instant noodles for dinner because neither of us wanted to cook.
Te Anau the next morning was a different world. The rain had cleared overnight, and the lake was calm, the mountains on the far shore reflected in the water with an almost unnerving clarity. Lake Te Anau is the second-largest lake in New Zealand by surface area, and it has the quality of a body of water that doesn’t care whether you’re looking at it or not. We walked a section of the Kepler Track in the morning — just the first hour or so from the control gates — and found ourselves alone on the trail. The track runs along the lake edge, through beech forest with occasional clearings that open onto views across the water. The ground was still wet, and the roots on the path were slick. A pair of weka birds crossed ahead of us, moving with the self-important stride of creatures that know they’re supposed to be rare but don’t feel like acting like it.
The glowworm caves, the main reason most visitors stop in Te Anau, don’t look like much from the outside. The entrance is a low rock arch on the western shore of the lake, reachable only by a boat that departs from the town jetty. The boat ride across is about thirty minutes, and the lake chop can be surprisingly rough — a local at the campsite had warned us about seasickness, and we’d dismissed it until we felt the deck rise beneath us on the way over. The caves themselves are limestone, carved by the same underground river that still flows through them. The tour takes you inside on a small punt, flat-bottomed and silent, and you float through a low passage where the guide kills the lights and you’re supposed to look up at the glowworms covering the ceiling. They look like a night sky full of tiny blue-green stars, but the experience has less to do with what you see than what you don’t see — the absolute dark, the sound of the river moving beneath you, the awareness that you’re floating through a cave that was only discovered in the late 1940s. We’d read about it beforehand, expected a gimmick, but found ourselves quiet on the boat ride back. The lake had calmed, and the evening light was starting to settle on the water in bands of gold and grey.
Driving east from Te Anau toward Dunedin the next morning meant leaving the fiordland behind for the farmland of the south. The road skirts the edge of the Catlins for a while, then pushes north through rolling green hills. We stopped for petrol in a small town called Gore, which turned out to be home to a giant fibreglass trout and a museum dedicated to the brown trout fishery — a detail that felt so perfectly New Zealand that we couldn’t bring ourselves to mock it. A woman at the counter sold us two meat pies and a bag of apples for $18 and asked where we were headed. When we said Dunedin, she nodded and said, “Watch out for the students. They drive like they’ve got nothing to lose.” We didn’t see any students on the road, but we saw plenty of sheep.
Dunedin surprised us. It’s a city built on hills so steep that parts of it feel like you’re driving through a post-industrial San Francisco, minus the fog and plus a lot of Scottish architecture. The Otago Peninsula runs east from the city center into the Otago Harbour, a narrow finger of land that hosts albatross colonies, a penguin sanctuary, and the kind of coastal scenery that makes you wonder why more people don’t move here. We drove out to the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head and watched the birds ride the thermals above the cliffs — enormous, effortless, their wingspans so wide that they looked like they were moving in slow motion even when they were covering ground fast. The colony is the only mainland albatross breeding site in the world, and the birds here are northern royal albatrosses, with a wingspan that can reach three meters. Standing on the cliffside with the wind pressing hard against our jackets, watching them bank and turn above the roil, we didn’t need a sign to tell us we were in a genuinely special place. The wind had the salt and the bite and the cold of the Southern Ocean.
Baldwin Street, which claims to be the steepest residential street in the world, is less a destination than a curiosity. The gradient is severe — the road rises one meter for every 2.86 meters of travel at its steepest section. We drove up it in the campervan, which we’d been warned against doing, and regretted it almost immediately. The van’s engine laboured, the clutch complained, and at the top, where the road flattens briefly before dropping back down, we sat in the driver’s seat for a moment, smelling the heat of the brakes and wondering if we’d just made a mistake. Climbing the street on foot is probably the better option. The view from the top looks out over the city and the harbour, and there’s a certain absurd pleasure in standing on a road that looks less like a street than a ramp leading to nowhere. A group of tourists were taking turns lying down on the asphalt for photos, their heads downhill and their feet pointing skyward.
Larnach Castle, perched on the Otago Peninsula, is New Zealand’s only castle. This is a fact that sounds more impressive than it actually is, because the building dates from 1871 and was built for a banker, not a king, and the castle aesthetic here is less medieval fortress than Victorian mansion that got carried away with itself. The gardens are the real draw — 15 acres of grounds restored with obsessive horticultural care, divided into themed sections that include a rock garden, a rhododendron walk, and a maze. We walked through the ballroom and saw the stained glass windows and the imported Italian marble, and it was all tasteful and well-preserved, but the gardens were where we spent most of our time. The rhododendrons were in bloom, their colour a deep, almost fluorescent pink that seemed to vibrate against the green of the lawn. A gardener was trimming a hedge near the gate, and we asked her how long the restoration had taken. “Longer than I’ve been alive,” she said, laughing. “And I’ve been here twenty-three years.”
Oamaru, the next day, has two distinct personalities. The first is the Victorian precinct — a collection of whitestone buildings from the 19th century that line the main street and look, in the right light, like the set of a period film that never got made. The second is the blue penguin colony, which sits at the edge of town and attracts visitors willing to sit on concrete grandstands in the cold dusk, watching the smallest penguin species in the world waddle ashore after a day of fishing. The penguins come in at sunset. They emerge from the surf in groups, hesitating at the water’s edge, then making a collective decision to scramble up the rocks and across the beach toward their burrows. There’s a boardwalk that allows you to watch from above, and the colony provides red lights — penguins can’t see red, so the light doesn’t disturb them — which gives the whole scene a kind of theatrical warmth. The birds are small, maybe a foot tall, their movements simultaneously clumsy and purposeful. A retired marine biologist from Christchurch, sitting next to us with a thermos of hot chocolate, said he’d been coming to this colony for sixteen years. “They change their routes a little each season,” he said. “The colony’s growing. But the rhythm never changes.” He shared the hot chocolate without being asked.
The Moeraki Boulders, a short drive north of Oamaru, are the kind of geological oddity that photographs make look like a hoax until you’re standing in front of one, touching its surface, realizing it’s real. They’re large, spherical concretions scattered along Koekohe Beach, some of them two meters across, formed over millions of years by the accumulation of calcite around a central core. The Maori legend says they’re the remains of eel baskets and gourds washed ashore from a great canoe wreck, which is a better story than the geological explanation and feels truer to the spirit of the place. The light was flat and grey when we arrived — typical for this coast — and the boulders sat on the wet sand like the eggs of some impossibly large creature, each one perfectly round in a way that nature isn’t supposed to be. We walked the length of the beach. A few had cracked open, revealing the crystalline interior, and we crouched beside one of these, running our fingers along the fracture, the surface cold and rough.
The drive from Oamaru to Kaikoura is roughly four hours, most of it along State Highway 1, which hugs the coast for long stretches. We’d been told that the road was prone to closures after heavy rain, but the weather held, and we made good time. The landscape shifts as you approach Kaikoura — the mountains come closer to the sea, and the road begins to wind through cuttings that expose the rock in layers, each one a different shade of grey and brown. The town itself sits between the ocean and the Seaward Kaikoura Range, a dramatic setting that makes the place feel like a natural endpoint for a journey. The whale watching is the main draw here, and we’d booked a morning tour. The boat left from the marina at 7:30, and within an hour we were watching a sperm whale surface, exhale a plume of mist that hung in the cold air, and then arch its back and dive, its tail rising slowly and then disappearing into the water like a door closing.
The whale watching industry in Kaikoura operates with a kind of quiet professionalism. The skippers know where to find the whales because they’ve been doing it for decades, and the tracking equipment — sonar, underwater microphones — does the rest. We saw three sperm whales total, each one surfacing for roughly ten minutes before diving again, and a pod of dusky dolphins that played in the boat’s wake for a quarter of an hour. The seals at the colony near the point were less active, lounging on the rocks like teenagers on a summer afternoon. One of them was scratching itself with a flipper, the motion slow and deliberate, and we watched it for longer than we expected.
We spent our last evening on the coastal walk that runs south from the town, a path that climbs the bluffs above the seal colony and offers views down the length of the coastline toward the Kaikoura Peninsula. The light was going, and the wind had picked up, and the sea was the colour of graphite. We’d been on the road for ten days by then, and the campervan had collected a layer of dust and mud and the faint smell of cooking oil. Tomorrow we’d take it back to the depot in Christchurch, wipe down the counters, fill the tank, and walk away. But that evening, standing on the bluff with the wind pressing against our faces and the sound of the waves below, none of that felt urgent.
📷 Photos: Fabian (Unsplash), Jayde Keroi (Unsplash)
