On the North Island of New Zealand, the lively cities of Auckland and Wellington contrast with the charm of Rotorua, the thermal valley of Wai-O-Tapu and the cinematic Hobbiton. While on the South Island, nature is the great protagonist, with its glaciers, Otago beaches, pearly mountain ranges, forests, the Scottish air of Dunedin, penguins, royal albatrosses and Fiordland National Park.
North Island, Kiwi lifestyle, geysers and Maori culture
New Zealand has two islands. Actually, two different worlds. And in just three hours by ferry between Picton and Wellington you go from one to the other. From the fjords, temperate rain forests, glaciers and alpine peaks of the South Island to the tame green hills of the North Island, where 3.7 of the country’s 5.1 million people live, 72.3% of its five million milking cows, the totality of the geysers and the landscapes of Mordor.
Does that make the North Island less interesting? Absolutely. Each one has its peculiarities and its magic. On the South Island one can go hours without seeing anyone (its population density is 6.7 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to 27.5 on the other), but in the North you can enjoy the pleasant Kiwi lifestyle with a glass of wine as you sail across beautiful Auckland Bay . Or immerse yourself in the Maori culture, protected and more alive than ever, because those first Polynesian settlers settled in this place given its better climate and ease of cultivation, and barely set foot on the South Island.
But, let us start at the beginning. The ferry that crosses the Cook Strait between the two islands docks in Wellington, the country’s capital (yes, it’s Wellington, not Auckland). Wellington is a modern, simple and pleasant city, easy to see in a morning. It has few historical vestiges, but the main one justifies any stay. The old Government House simulates an Italian Renaissance palace. It’s just that it’s all wood; actually one of the largest and most complex wooden buildings in the world. If you don’t get close and knuckle him—knock, knock—you don’t believe it. In this city, you also have to walk along the Waterfront, an old port area now full of warm restaurants and terraces; take a photo in front of the New Zealand Parliament and wander down Lambton Quay street, the most commercial and crowded street.
New Zealand is a very young country. The first settlers arrived from Eastern Polynesia around 1250. And the first Europeans with the intention of settling, at the beginning of the 19th century. So it is a country made in waves. And one of the most important was that of the gold rush of 1862. The appearance of nuggets in the Arrow River, on the South Island, unleashed a pull effect attended by thousands of European go-getters. From that time are many of the historic mining towns that still remain today, such as Greytown, about 80 kilometers northeast of Wellington, whose only street is a compendium of wooden Victorian buildings. Today it is a completely gentrified tourist town, but if we removed the shop windows with the souvenirsfor tourists and we exchanged them for picks, shovels and sieves it would seem that we went through the tunnel of time.
Those Polynesians who came from far away in canoes founded the Maori culture on this North Island — the South Island was too wild and cold for people who came from the warm South seas. Persecuted for decades, today the Maori culture and language are protected by law and have their center in Rotorua, another charming city of low houses on the shores of the lake of the same name. If one were left alone with Eat Street —short, pedestrianized and full of restaurants and cocktail bars in the center—, peace and love for nature would go away in a breath. Fortunately, Eat is just an anecdote. What travelers come to Rotorua for is to see its famous thermal valley, which lies about 30 kilometers south of the city. It’s called Wai-O-Tapu,It has been carved over thousands of years by geothermal activity and has been a sacred Maori area for centuries. New Zealand, and especially the North Island, is the daughter of volcanism. This manifests itself, above all, in the volcanic zone of Taupo, in the center of this territory; a plateau 350 kilometers long by 50 wide filled with geothermal fields and volcanic vents. One of them is Wai-O-Tapu. In this country, nature is paid for, so after paying the mandatory entrance fee (32.50 New Zealand dollars; about 20 euros at current exchange rates) you access a network of paths that border smoking craters of the most diverse colors, the result of the minerals they accumulate. The classic route, marked in red, takes about 45 minutes and passes through what is the most beautiful thermal pool in the valley: the Champagne Pool, a lake with smoky waters with vibrant orange tones (precipitation of arsenic and stibnite) whose waters at more than 75 degrees bubble due to CO2 coming from the bottom; hence the name.
Closer to Rotorua, just outside the city, is another geothermal area: Te Puia.Here the star is Pōhutu, the largest active geyser in the southern hemisphere (it can shoot water 30 meters high) and the most unpredictable in the world: it does not have a cadence of eruptions nor is it known how long they will last; They can be from a few minutes to… 250 days in a row throwing boiling water! That happened between 2000 and 2001. What Te Puia actually represents is a space for the conservation of Maori culture. It has a craft center where they work in front of the public carving wood and other materials, a recreation of a Maori village and a terrarium where, with great luck, you can see a kiwi (a flightless, nocturnal and elusive bird, became a national emblem). Every night there is a Maori dance show followed by a traditional dinner. The function is very weak, but the dinner is worth it:
There are still more places to visit in the North Island. Napier, on the east coast, is the art deco city . The 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake destroyed it, and it was rebuilt in the style of the period. You walk through its streets and you think you are in a Hollywood movie from the fifties. Of course, we must not forget Hobbiton either , the village of the hobbits . A friend told me that in New Zealand they have three industries: meat, milk and Lord of the Rings. Fans of the saga who come looking for the landscapes and sets of the films have a must-see in this particular farm whose owners Peter Jackson rented a part to set the stage for what would become Hobbiton. Mr. Alexander, the owner, put one condition on him: that he not disassemble the set. Today the 50 hobbit houses , the mill, the bridge and even The Green Dragon tavern look exactly the same as on screen. And they have become one of the most visited attractions in the country, as well as an incredible money machine for the Alexanders.
Every trip to the North Island ends (or begins) in Auckland, which with its more than a million and a half residents is the most populous city in the country. Here comes together all the glories and miseries of a great metropolis (from traffic jams to exorbitant house prices), nothing to do with the sulphurous solitudes of the Taupo volcanoes. But that doesn’t make it less worth discovering. Auckland is the typical city one would stay in because all the quality of life parameters range from remarkable to outstanding. You walk along the long boardwalk that runs from downtown to Mission Bay and you think that nothing bad can happen in a place like that. There is a lot of young atmosphere in the bars and terraces around the ferry station and commercial life until late in the evening on Queen Street, the fashion avenue. It is convenient to go up to the Sky Tower to get an idea from up there of the beauty of the bay where it sits. And visit the Auckland Museum to, in its rooms dedicated to history, Maori and Polynesian culture, volcanism, flora and fauna, the arrival of Europeans, modernity or its link with the Commonwealth, understand once and for all all the curious society that forged this almost perfect country, but far from any other place in the world.
South Island, apotheosis of nature
A land of captivating contrasts, the South Island is home to New Zealand’s most unusual landscapes, from glaciers to pristine beaches, pearly volcanic ridges and dreamy valleys. Although for Europeans it is an antipodal land, upon arrival you immediately feel as if you had already been there at some time. I landed from Sydney in the largest city on the island called, among other names, Aoraki by the Maori, who came here by canoe from Polynesia when Dante and Giotto were creating the Renaissance in Europe. Hit by a strong earthquake in 2011, Christchurch seems to have just been assembled, and some streets, sets for an urban theater. Even its cathedral is made of cardboard, since the stone one is still half in ruins. The most ancient seems its great botanical garden, whose exuberant vegetation evokes scenes of greenery and mystery ofThe piano and the Tolkien saga.
In this sleepy town I met Paul, a sailing poet of Irish blood. With him I spent evenings of Celtic rhythms and pints of Guinness. One morning he took me out on his sailboat across beautiful Akaroa Bay with two German friends. We swam very close to dolphins and seals, and we look out over the open sea, the most open of all seas.
Leaving Christchurch behind, the east coast reserves the surprise of Oamaru, a ghost town taken over by penguins. Its port was important in the middle of the last century and wide streets lined with buildings the color of whale ivory remain from that Victorian splendor. Those Dickensian facades and the wide stormy bay entertained me for a couple of days, as did the bustle of the penguins returning from hunting at sunset to the rocks where they live. Then I ended up in Dunedin, a city with a Scottish air that smells of bagelsalready whiskey Following the fiery verses of Robert Burns, waves of immigrants poured in here in the mid-19th century, building their own Edinburgh underbelly. Dunedin became home to writers such as Janet Frame and Charles Brush, who gave it an intellectual lineage recognized by UNESCO by declaring it the eighth literary city in the world.
In Dunedin, a foundation from the Otago Peninsula hosted me for a week. The little house faced a calm sea, like a fjord, and had belonged to a couple of painters. Robert and two other artists took care of me and lent me a bicycle, with which I toured the beautiful peninsula. At its end is the largest royal albatross colony in existence. They can be seen on the cliffs, white and majestic, giant ducks with white and gray plumage, incubating their eggs. I went out on a boat to see them up close. They rocked out to sea with majestic indifference, keeping distances from each other, they are individualistic birds. From time to time, a specimen would stand up and begin to pat the water with its feet to help it take off, like a feathered seaplane; the lumbering albatrosses need waves and wind to lift themselves up and fly.
Robert and his wife, having arrived from England more than 20 years ago, took me to remote Otago beaches where sea lions and seals napped on the dunes or fished in the stagnant waters at low tide. They explained to me that the peaceful and open Maoris, unlike the Australian aborigines, immediately made an agreement with the British, who recognized their rights and integrated them. That is why in this land there is an atmosphere of harmony and peace, very different from that of the big southern sister, populated by convicts while New Zealand was populated by clerics. The landscape of soft lines, the clean air, the absence of horizons and the scant human presence, everything produced serenity in Otago, a stateless detachment. It is the calm of the last frontier of civilization. Perhaps that is why the albatross
On tiny Stewart Island, half an hour by ferry from Invercargill—New Zealand’s southernmost city—there is another kind of calm, a truly southern atmosphere. Close to the Antarctic circle, sparsely populated, Stewart attracts hikers and keen ornithologists. At night excursions are organized to see the kiwi, which is the emblem of the country, in its natural habitat. It is a very shy bird, with a long beak and the size of a small chicken. It comes out at night, although some travelers I met told me they saw one pensively crossing the paths around Oban, the only town on the island. The coastal forests form a Jurassic jungle, with an abundance of lichens and fine palm trees. At the top of Mount Anglem, its highest point (980 meters), the Maori name of the island is understood: Rakiura,
On a walk around the island I came to an old raised cemetery overlooking a lonely beach. As I read English and Scottish names on the old tombstones I saw a huge black creature emerge from the gentle waves. I descended the hill to walk the wooded path that led to the dunes. Seeing me, the amphibian creature that seemed to have got the wrong place and had a strange snout in the shape of a flat trunk, rushed towards me with an elephant’s roar. I later learned that elephant seals, despite weighing 3,000 kilos, can move on land at nine kilometers per hour powered by their flexible hips. My frantic flight into the woods discouraged him and he began to chase a naive bird that was soaking in a stream. From time to time it emitted a deafening languid roar.
Gateway to Fiordland National Park on the west coast of the South Island, the waters off Te Anau are cold and muddy. But in the summer, at the beginning of January, it is pleasant to swim in the lake. A fascinating route starts from Te Anau that culminates in Mildford Sound, a long fjord sheltered by untouched mountains of singular beauty. Waterfalls, colonies of seals lying indolently on the rocks or swimming near the boat that leads to the mouth. And then, further north, in the small town of Franz Josef with a Tyrolean atmosphere, the heated hike to the glacier of the same name with the feeling of going to a frozen temple of antiquity. In Westland National Park one can spend months exploring trails and admiring nature’s whims.
The mountain ranges and the peaks, the torrents and the lakes, the plains and the hills of Aoraki leave in the mind a sensation of eternal calm and, at the same time, of transit, of impermanence. Crossing the island from east to west through the so-called Arthur’s Pass, with landscapes dotted with sheep and huge trees that sigh between rivers of cold water, I seemed to be following in the wake of the hobbits of Middle-earth.
Up the island, on the north coast, the emerald sea of Abel Tasman offered me one of the greatest joys for a swimmer: pure, light water that seemed to have fallen from the sky the night before. Before boarding the Wellington ferry to cross to the North Island, one last walk from Picton through the tall forest that surrounds this port city. It rained fitfully, but as we reached the headland of Queen Charlotte View the sun shone again on a vista of arms of land stretching like gnarled green fingers across the vast Tasman Sea.
