Tag Archives: greymouth

Road Trip Highlights

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Did you enjoy riding along with us on our month long road trip across the north and south islands of New Zealand? We had so much fun exploring and adventuring  and sure hope you have the opportunity to explore it in person some day.

If you are interested in getting a copy of our itinerary, please email us at christine@svSugarShack.com.  The itinerary is broken down by day, with kilometers to each location, links to all activities, bars, restaurants, and hotels.  Here is a recap of our road trip.

Overall journey was well over 5,000km and took us about 28 days.

Here are highlights of each major stop:

North Island

Auckland- The City of Sails: Sky Tower and Viaduct

Loads of fun in Waitomo starting with the beautiful glow worms

And The Lost World Adventure where we abseiled 100m into the earth!

The road trip continues to Wellington, the southern most point in the North island and the capital of NZ.

South Island

We take a ferry across the straight to the South Island.  We visit the Nelson Classic Car Museum and take a Sky Wire ride over the valleys and trees.

The Abel Tasman Forest has several really cool hikes and caves to explore.

Next we make our way down the west side of the south island:  Westport, Charleston, Greymouth and Inchbonnie.

The absolutely beautiful pancake rocks stun us with their unique beauty.

We took a phenomenal helicopter ride over the Franz Josef glacier and dozens of other glaciers.

We get perplexed at Puzzling World and see a huge waterfall in Wanaka.

Definitely one of the highlights for me was our Shotover Jet Boat ride.  A truly thrilling and exhilarating experience!

My favorite day was our trip to Milford Sound where we took a 5.5 hour bus ride, 2 hour boat ride, and 45 minute plane over one of the world’s 8th wonders!

We make it all the way to the southern most point of the south island, Stirling Point at 46 36.53!

Stewart Island

Although we did not technically “drive” to Stewart Island (as you can’t bring your car over), we did take a ferry and enjoyed exploring this “3rd island” of New Zealand.

Our road trip finally turns us around and we have to head back north.  We start by going NE toward Dunedin which has the world’s steepest street (San Francisco has the world’s crookedest street).

We find beautiful, little blue penguins and a steampunk museum in Oamaru!

Christchurch is a city of potential being rebuilt after several natural disasters.

North Island

Tongariro National Park is the home of the world’s best one day hike.  Even though we could not do it, we did manage to hike over 15miles in 2 days.

Lake Tapu has many hot springs, geysers, and mud pools.

One of my favorite waterfalls is Huka Falls where 200,000 liters of water push through the falls every 9 minutes.

Orakei Koroko Geothermal Pools fascinated me with the vibrant colors, geysers, and hot pools.

The road trip continues on to Rotorua where we take a float plane over the lakes, volcano, and hot springs.

We loved the Redwood Tree Walk where we crossed over 28 swing bridges!

And we conclude our road trip with a relaxing day at Polynesia Spa where we soak in acidic and alkaline hot springs.

A truly once in a lifetime experience to be able to explore this amazing country by land.  Even though I felt like we saw a lot, we did not touch on so many other wonderful things.   I think a return visit will be in our future.

Events from this blog occurred in mid-February to mid-March 2023.  Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual live events.

Pancake Rocks, Goldmine, and a Shanty Town

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We leave Westport and head toward Greymouth.  In route, we come across a super cool hidden gem in Charleston called Mitchell’s Gully Historic Goldmine.  This goldmine was established in 1866 and produced over 130 tons of gold dust.

All over the entire property are old pieces of antique equipment.  Sure, some people may think it is junk, but I see it as century old relics begging to be fixed and made operational soon.

The owner has the original water wheel, which is in dire need of some TLC, but he hopes to get it working again soon.

He has the last remaining stamping batteries (crushing machines) in Charleston.

One of the old settlers cottage is still standing, but it is full of more antique mining equipment.

We were able to wonder through dozens of tunnels (with flashlights).  Most of the holes are carved right into the rocks and hillsides, but some are overtaken by tree roots (look at the bottom center photo).  Did the cave come before the tree roots or did the tree roots form along the entrance of the cave?

Many of the cave walls still have gold dust!  And one of the caves had glow worms!  The photo isn’t so good, but they were there, I promise.

The Process

The current owner is a descendent of one of the original owners and gave us a run down of the gold mining process.  He said that it would take sanding down 20tons of sand to get one ounce of gold.  Now that is a lot of work!

The piece of gold in my hand (lower right corner) is 1/3 of an ounce and worth $1000NXD.

We walked a giant loop around this immense property and the trail was marked by the original dolly tracks.  This place is so very cool. I sure hope the owner is able to get some help to restore it!

Beautiful views

We continue on our way and come across some gorgeous views!

Punakaiki – Pancake Rocks

This little town is famous for its pancake rocks.  You may think, “pancake rocks” what, why?  Well check them out – kind of obvious as they look like a stack of pancakes.

They have a really well tended 45-minute track that walks you around the mountain edges to see all of the beautiful formations.

These pancake rocks are really super cool.  I am sitting on a short stack of cakes 🙂

The blow hole was not too active as we went by, but the gully sure is amazing.

Let’s see how much imagination you have….can you see the images from the lower photo in the top photo?

The Pororari River Track

Time to get our daily walk in so we make our way to the Pororari River track.  This is about 1.5 hour hike on a well-maintained trail along the river, through a few caves, under a few trees and ending at a swing bridge.

This is a really cool trail that takes you through several caves carved out of the rock mountain side and through the tree roots!

There were some pretty darn steep portions, but overall I would rate this a moderate level trail.

We end at a beautiful swing bridge.

We stop in for lunch at Speight’s Brewery (one of the boy’s favorite NZ beers).

Shantytown – Greymouth

Our last stop is Shantytown just outside the town of Greymouth.  We arrive just before closing so they gave us a bit of a discount and told us we had an hour.  The good news is that there were not many people around, but the bad news is that we missed the opportunity to dress up for an old time photo, missed the steam train, and missed the hologram room.

All of the buildings are from the 1800’s.  Most have been relocated and restored from other cities around NZ.  They even had a few stables and liveries.

Of course a general store, barber, and theater.

A beautiful, tiny church.

An old stream train.  We missed the last ride by a few minutes, but the conductor humored us with all of our questions.

They had a collection of old engines back in the foundry.

We had some fun at the county jail and outhouse (check Matt out!)

Since Matt was misbehaving, we locked him up!

Old Friends in a New Country

We had met Fran and Grant (sailing boat Te Kinga)  in French Polynesia over 2 years ago.  They have property in the south island and had invited us to stay.  They converted an old church into an Air BnB but we got to stay with them in their beautiful tree house!  You can check them out at Hidden Valley Lodge.

  • Hotel: Hidden Valley Lodge
  • Kilometers Traveled:  175km
  • Total Time Traveled:  3hrs
  • Kilometers Walked:  13.1km

Events from this blog post occurred in early March.  Our posts run 8-10 weeks behind actual events.  Be sure to read our last blog post!