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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.

Big Travel Day

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We have a big travel day today and have to get up at the ungodly hour of 0430.  We leave Christchurch before 0500 barely awake.  Not too excited to be driving in the pitch black with low flying clouds and fog all around.  It makes for slow going. 

The drive is about 4.5 hours on a two lane windy road along the coast and up and over the mountains.  The beautiful moon is still out but the moving car makes it difficult to get a good clear shot of her.  I guess if you have to travel so early it is a blessing to be rewarded with the moon and sun rise.

Two hours into our journey the sun starts to come up.  What a beautiful site to see after traveling in the darkness.

I have yet to post photos of us in the car – probably because it is not too exciting, but here we are.

Lucky for us, we arrive with 20 minutes to spare.  We had to be at the ferry dock before 1000 which is the last time vehicles can check in and we arrived at 0940.

Picton Ferry Dock

We get in the que (NZders love their ques), get our pass and pull into the loading lines.  By 1000 we were slowly moving to our ship to board.  Somehow they load all the trailers, trains, campervans, cars, motorcycles, and passengers early.  Our boat the Aratere leaves 10 minutes early.

We are very lucky that our ship left today.  We had several friends booked on the Kaiarahi and their ferry transports were cancelled.  They each received an email stating their ride was cancelled and nothing else.  Evidently, the ship broke down and is out of service for a week!  We are so blessed!

Wellington

We arrive into Wellington just in time to check in to our hotel West Plaza Wellington.  After we drop off the car we walk down to the city center and hop on the cable car.  

The cable car celebrated 121 years this year.  It is 785 meters long and rises 199m up.  It goes through three tunnels and 4 viaducts.  The two cable cars are powered by a steam engine which powers a winding gear that drives a continuous wire rope / haulage cable.  This operates one line or track which can haul two cars in either direction.

Two of the three tunnels are lit up in a colorful design.  They can even custom design the light show for special occasions.

The 2023 cable car (top left) and the track (top right)

The top photo is the original winding house for the cable car system which operated this line from 1902 to 1978.  The cable car on the lower left is car #1 and the one on the right is cable car #3.  Both original, both restored to their former beauty.

Cool experience and interesting museum to explore.  It was a long travel day to get to Wellington, but worth the drive in the end.

  • Kilometers Traveled: by car: 361km by boat 67km
  • Hotel: West Plaza Hotel Wellington
  • Total travel time:  9 hours
  • Kilometers walked: 5.2km

Events from this blog post occurred in mid-March.  Because we have so many interesting and thrilling things to share with you, we created more blogs.  Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind live events.  We explore Christchurch and learn about the massive earthquake that destroyed 85% of the city in our last blog post.

The Capital of Wellington

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We leave Waitomo and drive 6 hours to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. It was a beautiful drive through the countryside with rolling green hillsides full of cows, sheep, goats, horses, and even alpacas!

First, a quick stop at our hotel, The Trinity Hotel, to drop off the car and our bags.  This is a large hotel just off the wharf.  We had one room with double and single beds which did not leave much room for our bags.  They did have a small refrigerator and a nice bathroom.  In addition, they had a beautiful rooftop deck which served drinks.

We explore for a few hours down by the wharf. The parliament building is affectionately called “The Bee Hive” which is no surprise when you look at the building (top right photo).  We did not have time to do the tour, but we did enjoy walking around the grounds.

We find the famous 385lb stainless fern globe estimated cost of $210,000NZD!  It truly is beautiful and fills the civic square sky perfectly. Not sure what is up with the ugly hand sculpture, but it made it into the photo anyway.

We find the college district with lots of bars and eateries and end up meeting one of Matt’s friends.  Matt and Chris worked together at Pluck and had not seen each other in 10 years.  We met him in this super funky little back ally bar called Gildings Free Dive.  It is covered in Star War’s paraphernalia!

Wellington has their very own locks of love wall where couples hang a padlock to signify their love.

Wellington Museum

The Wellington Museum is located down by the wharf and is FREE!  Sweet. The museum is in a beautiful, old building and consists of 4 floors.  It is a short snippet of history including models of old ships, old television studios, and more.  A little something for everyone.

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Dozens of people told us to visit the Te Papa museum and it did not disappoint!  A massive museum that could have easily taken a full day to explore, but we only had a few hours.

One of the main reasons we came to this museum was to see a new gallery called Gallipoli The Scale of Our War.  This exhibit is told through the eyes of 8 ordinary New Zealanders and it is heart wrenching and moving.

The Gallipoli exhibit was very impressive with displays that were more than 2.5x human size!  The museum joined forces with Weta workshop to create the sculptures that are incredibly life like with pores in their skin and hair on their hands, legs, arms, and faces.

Look up close to the lower right photo to see the amazing details of these sculptures.

Toward the end they have a beautiful poppy display that allows the visitor to leave a remembrance of a loved one.

Te Taiiao Nature Exhibit

The next exhibit is a nature exhibit and the effects on the land.  They had more replicas of the giant Moa bird and lots of kiwis.

They also had the largest squid in the world – which was really kind of creepy.

On another floor they had the history of Maori culture with a large waka (canoe), community center, and a cow made of corn beef cans.

Wellington is known for having lots of earthquakes.  One of the cool features installed in most of the buildings is the earth quake proof system they have installed.  So, we venture down below the Te Papa museum to check out their Quake Braker.

It truly is a magnificent museum.  My photos and brief description don’t do it justice, but I just couldn’t capture all of the amazingness of this place.

At the end of the day we drove onto the Interislander Ferry which took us across the Cook’s Straight to the South Island.

  • Hotel:   Trinity Hotel
  • Kilometers Traveled:  525km
  • Travel Time: 6hrs10min
  • Kilometers Walked: 6.4km

Events from this blog occurred during the end of February 2023.  Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual events.  Don’t miss our last blog post when we abseil 100m into the earth to visit The Lost World.