Fiordland National Park

From Napier, we headed out to circle the south island of New Zealand. There are only 600,000 people living there, out of a total population of 4 million; most of those live in the two major cities on the south island, Christchurch and Dunedin. Our first stop was at Fiordlands National Park, in the far southwest of the island. We went through the three major fjords—Milford, Dusky, and Doubtful, the latter two seldom being visited, because of the difficulty of the terrain. This is one of the wettest parts of the country, and our unbroken string of good weather came to an end here. In fact, it was so chilly and windy that we had to dig out our Antarctica parkas.

Also fascinating was the rift where two tectonic plates came together. New Zealand is an extremely active volcanic and earthquake-prone region overall, with major credit going to the shifting tectonic plates. At the entrance to Dusky Sound, Captain Cook once spent six weeks repairing his ship after a series of storms at sea. It hasn't changed much at all – in fact, you can still see the tree stumps that he cut down to provide a space for instruments measuring the transit of Venus.

Cooks Bay

Dunedin

Dunedin is the southern-most of New Zealand's cities and is home to the oldest university in the country. We opted to take the Taieri Gorge Railway, a narrow-gage track that was for many decades the only connection to the outside world for the dozens of little villages in the steep hills and mountains inland from Dundee. It was an amazing feat of construction at the time (late 1800s). It's been run for the past few decades as a tourist train, for both the rural scenery as well as the feats of engineering. The train station it left from is one of the most beautiful in the country.

Dig Pig?

You can learn a lot about a country by walking through its markets and stores. While shopping in Dunedin, we came across a magazine called “New Zealand Pig Hunter” Seemed like a real niche product, but no, there are 25,000 pig hunters in the country going after feral pigs. Like Australian possums, the wild pigs cause a lot of damage to the environment. Who knew?

Christchurch

The largest city on the south island, Christchurch, is a delightful city (as are all NZ cities from what we've experienced). Tidy, nicely laid out, lots of street art, excellent tourist infrastructure, great views of the water, helpful citizens, big parks and botanical gardens, with open country and mountains just beyond the town limits. Big enough to have good restaurants and cultural activities, small enough to be manageable. Decent year round weather.