Time to Make Tracks: Driving from Franz Josef Glacier to Motueka

Our clockwise driving tour of New Zealand's South Island is going amazingly well. We've more or less acclimated to driving on the left, so driving on the highways here has become a truly fun and relaxing pursuit, much like it is back home.

But today, we have a big trip ahead of us: a seven-hour drive from Franz Josef Glacier to the town of Motueka, New Zealand, which is way up on the north side of the South Island. Clearly, we'll have to summon our inner Americans and get into "power vacation" mode: getting up early, screaming down the highway, and putting some serious distance between us and the west coast.

It's time to make tracks.

One reward for getting a really early start was seeing excellent morning lighting for misty landscape photographs.


We drove for over an hour before even stopping for coffee, since finding an open cafe on the South Island's west coast can be next to impossible at 7:00am. We stopped off in the tiny town of Ross, NZ for a cup of the good stuff, while a jukebox played cowboy music in the background. This coffee was so strong that I spontaneously sprung several new hairs on my chest...


...and Laura had to put about seven sugars into hers.


We drove through Hokitika, a sizeable town featuring a sphagnum moss processing plant, big farm equipment outlets and several outdoor stores.


There was a slight delay as a "wide load" driver had to check the clearance under a one-lane trestle. He had just inches to spare.


Another feature fairly common to this region of the South Island is the combination train-and-car one-lane bridge. In the case of this particular bridge, the traffic coming from the other side of the bridge gets priority, while the traffic coming from my direction gets last priority. The train gets the right of way all the time.


Ho, hum: another typical, everyday, shockingly beautiful New Zealand landscape, just begging to be photographed.


A very typical type of New Zealand camper, almost all windows, which to us seemed like a metaphor for the people here. Everyone knows that New Zealanders are friendly, but they are also modest and don't talk about themselves much until you draw them out a bit.

But that's when you learn all sorts of things. It feels as if New Zealanders have nothing to hide.


The open road. In two days we will have driven four-fifths of the entire length of the South Island and seen a glacier. The photo below shows the kind of traffic that was typical throughout our drives on the South Island--we would soon find this to be typical in most areas of the North Island too.



One of the many, many war memorials we saw throughout the South Island. This was in a tiny town which was not much more than a crossroads; just a gas station and a couple of dozen houses. Every community across the country made sacrifices.