Wanaka to Kaikora via The West Coast

We drove over the Haast pass to get to the west coast, we stopped in Haast to look at the beach and the sea and continued driving up into glacier country.
The tree and plants change over on the west coast and look more tropical and bush like.

We also replenished our stash of local honey!

We stopped at Fox glacier as I wanted to see what it looked like 9 years on from when I last saw it and it has definitely got smaller but we couldn’t get a great view of it.
We decided to stay the night in Franz Jospeh which also has a glacier. Last time I was here I did a guided walk across it, now you can only access it by helicopter (making it expensive) due to how far it was retreated with warmer weather. Franz Jospeh was a cute village with some nice bars and restaurants.

We continued up the west coast towards Greymouth and stopped in Hokitika for an ice cream and leg stretch. The drives yesterday and today have been quite long as we haven’t seen anywhere we wanted to stop and stay for long so have just kept moving.

We then found a place called Lake Brunner about 30km from Greymouth which was perfect was swimming and relaxing and as the weather was so nice we stayed here for 2 nights. We fished, swam and did yoga and not much else!! We met a few people from the nzmca who invited us for drinks which was nice.

Our plan was to keep following the west coast and reach Abel Tasman which is at the north west of the South Island and then work our way around the north of the South Island and finish in kaikora (north east of the South Island), however we read about the Marlborough wine and food festival which is on 9th Feb and thought it was too good to miss so have changed our route to now go cross country to kaikora and then work our west to hopefully still get to Abel Tasman.

So, we went back to greymouth to refuel, not much else here, and then stared our route cross country. There wasn’t much to see here compared to the rest of the South Island so again we continued driving to get the miles in. We stopped at Hamner Springs which is a small alpine town, looks very man made but again is quite cute. We stayed here for the night and set off towards Kaikora the next day as we had booked a whale watch.