~2014 The Year of Adventure~: A Journey the Length of New Zealand

March and April were the end of summer and I had loved spending them up in the warm north. But I was about to make a pretty big change, and not one that a lot of New Zealanders would have done. I knew this from the strange looks I kept getting when I told people I was going to be spending May and June down in Invercargill. Really really strange looks… generally followed with questions like, “You do know that it is going to be winter while you are there right?” And “Did you look at a map before you agreed to that housesit?” Or “How much are they paying you?” I had to explain that before I had even arrived in New Zealand I for some reason had decided that Stewart Island was a place I had to visit. Invercargill was almost as close to the island as I could get and when I saw the housesit listed there I jumped at the chance. It didn’t hurt that it was a two month long housesit and that there were two cats to take care of.

Now not only was this a crazy move because of the weather and climate change. But this was almost one end of the country to the other end. I realized just how long of a trip this was going to be when I started putting it together and realized that it was probably going to take at least four days to travel that far via bus and ferry! The only way that I could do it faster was to take two flights or rent my own car. Luckily I was able to put together a trip using a night bus, ferry, a train and another bus that would get me from Whangarei on Sunday afternoon to Invercargill on Thursday night with a little bit of sightseeing on the way.

The first part of the trip was a bus down to Whangarei and luckily there were no road closures to delay us like when I had arrived. The trip was made rather interesting by a note passing local I met and ended up having dinner with while waiting for my night bus. We left Auckland at 7:30 and arrived in Wellington at the Railway Station at 6:30 in the morning. I can’t say I got a great amount of sleep but it wasn’t a bad way to cover a lot of ground and most of it was road I had already covered in my trip from Auckland to Palmerston North. As I was impatient for my morning coffee and my ferry ride over to the South Island I hauled my bags all the way over to the InterIslander terminal. That was a really long k! But thankfully I was able to check my luggage all the way through from Wellington’s ferry terminal to the rail station in Kaikoura. All that was left to do was enjoy crossing over.

The ferry ride takes about 3 hours but land is visible the entire time. The trip is 92 km by sea and starts in the Wellington Harbor. The trip then goes out into the Cook Strait.