The best two-week route through New Zealand

Fourteen days across both islands is possible. We build it when people insist. What it produces is a driving holiday: an internal flight or a ferry crossing in the middle, two transit days that see nothing, and a permanent low-level sense of being one day behind. Fourteen days on the South Island alone produces the trip people describe afterwards as the best they have taken.

So here is the route, in the order we build it, with the driving times we actually use rather than the ones the mapping app gives you.

The route in one table

Fly into Christchurch, out of Christchurch, anticlockwise. Six bases in thirteen nights.

Read the nights column rather than the driving column. Six bases in fourteen days is the number that makes this work. We have built routes with nine and we do not recommend them.

Day 1: Christchurch

An arrival day and nothing more. You land after a very long flight, collect the car in the afternoon or the following morning, and eat somewhere good. The city is still visibly rebuilding from the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, and one night is the right allocation.

Days 2 and 3: the West Coast

The drive over Arthur’s Pass is the first proper day of the trip and it earns its six to seven hours. The road climbs through beech forest, crosses the Southern Alps at the Otira viaduct and drops onto a coast that looks like nowhere else in the country: black sand, driftwood, rainforest running down to the sea.

Two nights at Franz Josef gives you a full day for the glacier. Read this part carefully. Both Franz Josef and Fox have retreated significantly and the valley walks no longer reach the ice. Getting onto a glacier means a helicopter, weather permitting, and in this rainfall it does not always fly. We book the flight and we write down the alternative in the same document: Lake Matheson at first light for the reflection of Aoraki, the Franz Josef valley walk to the terminal viewpoint, and the Okarito lagoon.

This is also the worst coast in the country for sandflies, and we mean that literally. Covered ankles at dusk.

Days 4 and 5: Wanaka

The Haast Pass road runs south along the coast and then inland through a river gorge past Thunder Creek Falls and the Blue Pools, and comes out at the top of Lake Wanaka. Five to six hours with the stops, which are the point.

Wanaka is what Queenstown was thirty years ago: a lake, a small town, mountains behind it, and a fraction of the traffic. The full day here goes to the Rob Roy Glacier track, about 6 miles (10 km) return up a valley to a hanging glacier, which is the best half-day walk in Central Otago and asks nothing technical of you. If the weather closes in, the alternative is the Central Otago wine country at Bannockburn and Felton Road, forty minutes away.

Days 6 to 8: Glenorchy or Arrowtown, not Queenstown

Three nights, and this is the base where we most often disagree with the itinerary somebody sends us.

Queenstown is the busiest place on the South Island and carries the largest accommodation premium in the country. Arrowtown, twenty minutes away, is a preserved gold-mining town with good food and quiet evenings. Glenorchy, forty-five minutes up the lake on one of the best roads in New Zealand, is a settlement of a few hundred people at the head of Lake Wakatipu with the Dart and Rees valleys behind it.

You still spend time in Queenstown. You just do not sleep in it, and the difference in what the three days feel like is larger than it sounds.

What the three days hold: the drive to Glenorchy and up the Dart valley, a day walk on the lower Routeburn to the Routeburn Flats and back, and one Queenstown day for whatever you have come for, whether that is the Shotover jet boat, the gondola, the wineries at Gibbston, or a very good lunch and a swim in a cold lake.

We keep one of these three days deliberately unallocated. On a fourteen-day trip with a helicopter, a boat and an alpine pass in it, something will move.

Days 9 and 10: Te Anau and Milford

Three hours down to Te Anau, then the Milford day.

The road from Te Anau to Milford is about 74 miles (119 km) each way and takes two and a half hours in each direction with the stops you should make: the Mirror Lakes, the Chasm, the Homer Tunnel and the amphitheatre above it. There is no fuel after Te Anau. The road closes for avalanche control in winter and occasionally in spring, and it is a serious road in poor weather.

It rains here on roughly two days in three, and Milford in rain is arguably the better version, with hundreds of temporary waterfalls running down the walls that a clear day does not have. The failure mode is not rain. It is booking one Milford day with nothing behind it.

Two nights in Te Anau gives you a second morning. If the cruise went and the weather is good, use it on the Kepler Track day section up to the Luxmore ridge, or on Doubtful Sound, which takes longer to reach, is far quieter, and is preferred by most people who do both.

Days 11 to 13: Aoraki Mount Cook and the Mackenzie

Five to six hours back north by the Lindis Pass through tussock country that empties out completely, then west along Lake Pukaki, which is a colour that photographs badly, to the mountain at the end of it.

Two nights at Aoraki. The Hooker Valley Track, about 6 miles (10 km) return over three swing bridges to a glacial lake with icebergs in it, is one of the great short walks anywhere and is flat enough for almost anyone. The whole basin sits inside an international dark sky reserve, so the night sky is a scheduled activity rather than a bonus, and we book it.

One final night at Lake Tekapo on the way out, three hours from Christchurch, so that the last day is a drive and a flight rather than a drive, a flight and a panic.

Why this order

The long drives come early. Arthur’s Pass and Haast are on days two and four, when you are fresh and the novelty is doing the work. The last three days are short.

The weather-dependent days have days behind them. The glacier flight, the Milford cruise and the Aoraki night sky each have a second morning available if the first one fails. That is the single most valuable structural decision in the route.

Nothing is a one-night stop except the two ends. Six bases, and four of them have two or three nights.

It is a loop, so there is no backtracking. Anticlockwise puts the West Coast rain early and the settled interior late, which is also the better order for morale.

The alternatives, named

The same route as we sell it. The South Island in 14 days is this article with real lodges attached.

Fifteen days including the North Island. Possible if the North Island is kept deliberately tight: Auckland, Rotorua and Wellington, then the ferry and a shortened South Island. You lose the West Coast. See classic New Zealand in 15 days.

Twenty-one days for both islands properly. The honest length for the full country, with room for a Great Walk or Stewart Island. See New Zealand in 21 days.

Ten to twelve days. Cut the West Coast. Christchurch, Aoraki, Wanaka, the Queenstown region and Fiordland is a very good shorter trip with no long transit days in it at all. The ladder is in how many days do you need in New Zealand.

The North Island alone. Underrated on a second trip, and the right answer for anyone whose interest is Maori cultural life, geothermal country and volcanoes rather than mountains.

Clockwise instead. Christchurch, Aoraki, Fiordland, Queenstown, Wanaka, the West Coast, Arthur’s Pass. It works. We prefer anticlockwise because it puts the wettest region first, when you still have days to spare.

What it costs

Land only, per person, two people sharing, excluding international flights.

The helicopter days sit on top of that and we cost them separately. The full breakdown is in what two weeks in New Zealand really costs, and the honest leg-by-leg driving times are in our driving times article.

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Related

• New Zealand: the complete guide to planning your trip
• The South Island in 14 days
• New Zealand in 21 days
• The real driving times in New Zealand
• All our New Zealand trips

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