Canterbury and the West Coast - New Zealand Destinations

It may be the worst cliché ever, but New Zealand really is a land of contrasts. For the most part, the north is soft, green, and gentle. The South Island is dramatic, craggy, and weatherbeaten (all the battle and castle scenes from Lord of the Rings were filmed in the south). Dominating the landscape and dwarfing human habitation are the Southern Alps – young, steep mountains pocked with big U-shaped valleys carved out by glaciers

The city of Christchurch on the east coast is a bit of an oddity. The upper-crust English setters tried to create a southern version of Oxford or Cambridge, with stone gothic architecture and willow trees lining the winding river. They did manage to create a stiffer, more snobbish ambience than in the rest of the country, but beyond the centre the city has stuck to type as an American-style sprawl of faceless suburbs.

But no one comes to New Zealand for the cities – and within an hour or two of staid Christchurch is some jaw-dropping scenery. To make the most out of it – as with most of New Zealand – you really want to pack some hiking shoes and a warm jacket and get your lungs and legs in good order. The raw, elemental lanscape is the main attraction but you can get tired of just admiring the mountains. Hiking, mountain biking, horse riding, or, kayaking (especially in summer around the balmy bays near Nelson in the island’s north) will keep you engaged. In September or October, if you get up early and don a good wetsuit, you can even take a surf in the morning and then make it to one of the nearby ski fields by lunchtime.

The engaging-with-nature theme extends to the fauna. A couple of hours north of Christchurch at Kaikoura, a deep marine canyon just off the coast attracts all kind of sea life. The most impressive are the giant sperm whales that surface every so often and wave their tails about. They’re a pretty constant presence, and the tour company will even return 80 percent of your fee if you don’t see at least one whale It’s also environmentally kosher – the tour boats pick up the whales’ echolocation signals but don’t use sonar or anything that would disturb their natural patterns of behaviour.

In less than four hours from Christchurch you can cross the mountains to reach the west coast – another world again. An area of land larger than Wales is inhabited by just 30,000 people, mostly the remnants of gold or coal mining communities. As you head south, the fringe between mountains peaks and the ocean gets progressively thinner, until you reach the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers where massive tongues of ice slide off the mountainside and down through the middle of green beech forest, almost to the sea. Twenty minutes walk from the highway, you can get intimate with a glacier, strolling on to its icy toe.

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