Well, we’ve had a great time exploring New Zealand over the past 3 months and we’ve done a serious amount of tramping along the way. So it seems fitting that we conclude our trip to this fine country with one more multi-day trek, this time at the very northern tip of the island. The Cape Reinga Coastal Walkway is nearly 50 km long and begins at the northern end of Ninety Mile Beach, continues across secluded beaches, dunes and cliffs to the lighthouse and then finishes at Spirits Bay on the Pacific side. There are no huts along the way, which seems to put a lot of people off, but we loved it. Even during Easter school holidays, we only saw 2 other trampers (both going the opposite direction to us) and a couple of day ... read more

Imagine preparing for a 5 day back country camping trip. What would you take for meals? Generally the hardest meal to plan for is lunch. Breakfasts are usually oatmeal, and suppers we've defaulted to ready-made prepackaged dehydrated meals (at home we do our own dehydrating so we can be more creative). For the last several back country trips we've done here in NZ, we ate flavoured tuna and crackers for lunch. So by default that's what we planned to do this time around. On Day 1, halfway through his can of tuna, Jordan looked up at Kathie and said, "Ugh, I can't eat this anymore...". Kathie followed that with "me neither..." What do we do now? Thankfully Kathie is a great planner and had a couple of emergency packets of mac and cheese. Yay for hot ... read more

Our last stop on the south island was the Marlborough/Picton area. First we did some wine tasting near Blenheim. Neither of us are white wine drinkers but we had to try the world renowned Sauvignon Blanc from the region and it was actually pretty good (not that we would know any better anyways). We also treated ourselves to a gourmet lunch at the Allan Scott winery. The green-shelled mussels were huge and delicious! It was really nice because we don’t eat out much since our budget can’t really handle it over here. Hence why we don’t post much for food photos anymore since our cooking isn’t really photo-worthy… After our splurge in Blenheim, it was time to work off all those excess calories on the Queen Charlotte Track. At 71km long, it’s the longest track we’ve ... read more

Great Walk #2. Kepler was everything that Routeburn wasn’t. The weather finally turned in our favour and it was fantastic. Kepler is one of the few tracks in New Zealand that is planned in a loop, so you don’t have the transport headaches at the start and finish. Despite this, we did cheat a little bit and took a boat at the start which saved us a couple of hours and 6km of trees. We’re so glad that we did because we arrived at the Luxmore Hut with enough time to summit Mt Luxmore while the weather and views were good. The alpine views were absolutely awesome and we finally felt redeemed after Routeburn. From the top of Luxmore, we could see a storm front blowing towards us so we raced down ahead of it and ... read more

From Mt Cook we drove to Queenstown where we began our first attempt at one of New Zealand’s 10 “Great Walks”. The Great Walks aren’t exactly easy on the budget compared to other tracks in the country, but being the hikers that we are we figured we had to see what all the fuss is about. Our first day we had beautiful weather and it was also a fairly short day to get to Routeburn Flats. Unfortunately most of the day was spent hiking in the trees with no views, but the forest and river are quite nice. The next day was a long day where we hiked past Routeburn Falls up and over the Harris Saddle and then back down to Lake Mackenzie. This is meant to be the best part of the track where ... read more