Do you see the pink highlighted route above? That's the drive we were about to embark on. So we literally had to drive from the glaciers on the west coast, through the mountains, to a city called Kaikoura on New Zealand's south island upper east coast. Google maps estimates this drive to only take about 6.5 hours, but we knew that driving through the mountains would take a lot longer than that. So we planned this drive in 2 days. Another consideration we had to think about was that there's not a whole lot of lodging in between those two places. So we stopped just west of Arthur's Pass and stayed at Jackson's Retreat.
Ok, so there's a reason why there's only one or two places for lodging along the way... because there is seriously nothing there. No local towns, no local restaurants, no local anything. Just mountains, and valleys, and rivers. We had planned on eating at the restaurant located next door to Jackson's Retreat, but unfortunately when we got there it was closed (forever). Soooo, we had to drive quite a long ways in the middle of no where just to find some place to eat. I don't even remember where we ended up going to be honest... some seafood restaurant on a lake down country roads that were wayyyyy out of our way. One of the main reasons for getting a campervan was to have food with us at all times, but we totally failed on preparing meals for this leg of the trip - whoops!
There wasn't a whole lot to do at Jackson's Retreat. We went on a short hike to see a waterfall, and that's about it. It rained most of the time anyway. But we did see a pretty rainbow.
So the next morning we had a serious case of cabin fever and were ready to get back on the road and to our next destination! We were excited to see what the famous Arthur's Pass was all about.
Arthur's Pass is supposed to be one of the best roads in New Zealand. It's actually a tourist attraction listed in the Lonley Planet guidebook as one of the top must-drive-roads. People are drawn to it for it's snow-capped mountains, picturesque valleys, rivers, etc.
We were expecting some out of this world scenery! Sadly, we were sort of disappointed. Once we were on the other side, Joe and I looked at each other and said, "that's it?" I mean, sure - yes it was really pretty! But considering everything we had already seen and done, it just didn't blow us away.
If this would have been the beginning of our trip, I think we would have been really impressed. But because were were on our final leg of the trip and had already seen some spectacular sites, it was just okay. I probably sound like a spoiled brat saying that! Sorry! If we were going to do it all over again we'd either skip this route all together, or we would have done all the driving in one day.
I'm sad to tell you that we only have one destination in New Zealand left to write about! But we're going out with a bang, and I can't wait to share with you what's up next... my favorite part of our NZ trip: Kaikoura!
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