East Meets West

We thought it would take a while to drive the 321km coast to coast journey from Christchurch to Greymouth, crossing Arthur's Pass, "the most dramatic of the Southern Alps crossings" as up to this point the roads had been pretty windy and difficult to drive. So we set off really early intending to arrive, camp for the night and then do a walk the next day, only to arrive in Arthur's Pass Village, the main settlement on the pass, by lunchtime. We had driven through a lot of places with interesting names including Springfield, Craigieburn and Mount Cheeseman! However it was the scenery that was most interesting, beginning on the flat farmlands of the Canterbury Plains, rising through dense forest to snowy mountains which are popular ski resorts in the winter, then Arthur's Pass village at 735m, surrounded by high mountains.

We stopped in the village which receives four metres of rain a year and amazingly it was sunny. It did however rain later on in the day which wasn't surprising. The actual pass (920m) is 4km away and the village was full of tourists. It had lots of alpine looking lodges, a post office in a shed, a really good information centre and extremely expensive petrol. We decided to do a short but steep walk to a waterfall called the Devil's Punch Bowl (131m) which has to be one of the most beautiful waterfalls I've seen. As it began to rain we decided to carry on over the pass. We crossed the Otira Viaduct, a massive construction surrounded by amazing scenery and even got stuck on it for a while as there were roadworks. We took photos of it from the charmingly named Death Corner then decended quickly and arrived at Greymouth on the rugged West Coast.

State Highways

Three things noted about New Zealand SH:

1. These are the main important roads that run through NZ and usually the only route, and they are mostly single lanes, run right through towns and are so windy they would be considered very minor back roads in Britian.

2. Tourists drive at about 50km per hour on these roads, locals regularly exceed 100km/h.

3. They are re-surfacing roads EVERYWHERE!