Seventeen Days, Four People,
One Very Long Left-Hand Drive
Here is what actually happens when a family of four drives the entire South Island of New Zealand over 25 Dec. Spoiler: it involves icebergs in the middle of summer, a bird that chews your car, the best burger any of you will ever eat, and a sperm whale surfacing five metres from the bow on 25 Dec morning. Not a bad way to spend the school holidays.
✈️ The Flying Part
Two flights. Jakarta to Singapore (easy — you've done this a hundred times). Then Singapore to Christchurch: nine hours and fifty minutes over nothing but Southern Ocean. When you land at midnight, the air smells different. Cleaner. Cooler. There is almost no one here. New Zealand has five million people. Jakarta has thirty-five million. The silence will take a day to get used to.
🛒 The Grocery Shop That Matters More Than You Think
Day three starts with a mission: find kecap manis in Christchurch. (Yes, it exists. Yes, there is a whole Asian supermarket on St Asaph Street.) This is important. The high country has beautiful scenery but limited supermarkets. Stock up now, or live on pies. Actually — stop at Fairlie Bakehouse on the way and try the pies too. Venison. Butter chicken. You will not regret it.
🏔️ The Bit Where Everything Turns Turquoise
From Christchurch to Lake Tekapo, the road crosses the Canterbury Plains and then, over Burke's Pass, the Mackenzie Basin opens up and the water goes a shade of blue-green that your phone camera will try to correct — because no algorithm believes a lake is actually that colour. It is. Then Lake Pukaki. Then Mt Cook from Peter's Lookout, where a mountain fills the entire horizon and Argentyo will ask if we can drive to the top. We cannot. But we can walk to the icebergs.
🧊 Icebergs. In Summer. In a Lake.
The Hooker Valley Track is ten kilometres of flat walking that ends at a glacial lake with actual icebergs floating in it, in December, in summer, with the largest mountain in New Zealand behind them. The icebergs broke off the Hooker Glacier and some of them have been frozen since before your grandparents were born. Aghnando: you will want to touch one. You can. The water is extremely cold. You will touch it anyway.
🌿 The Wanaka Section (aka The Breathing Section)
Wanaka is where the trip finds its rhythm. The Airbnb has a full kitchen. You cook. Argentyo discovers That Wanaka Tree — a willow growing out of the lake that is somehow New Zealand's most photographed tree — and insists on a pre-sunrise visit. Aghnando jumps from a bridge into seven-degree glacial water at Blue Pools because he is sixteen and that is exactly the right age for that decision. Wanaka gives them a choice — drive the Haast Pass to the Blue Pools. Argentyo will want to stay for three hours. Let him.
⛵ Fiordland: Where Your Vocabulary Runs Out
The drive to Milford Sound goes through the Homer Tunnel, which was hand-drilled for nineteen years and comes out into a completely different world on the other side. Mitre Peak is 1,692 metres tall and rises directly from the water. The cruise takes two hours. Everyone goes quiet. This is not a bad thing. Sometimes a place is big enough that talking feels slightly rude.
🎡 Queenstown: Finally, Fun at Human Scale
After all that wilderness, Queenstown feels like the world remembered to be cosy again. Fergburger has a queue. Get in it. It takes forty minutes. It is worth it. Mrs Ferg next door does the gelato. Do both. The TSS Earnslaw has been burning coal across this lake since 1912 — stand on the upper deck, not in the saloon. At Walter Peak one dog moves fifty sheep in four minutes and Argentyo will not stop talking about it. Then Shotover Jet: 25 minutes of 360-degree spins through the Shotover Canyons. Arrowtown the next day is gold pans and cold river water and a hard story about the Chinese miners who stayed. Six luge runs in the afternoon. This is the section where the family stops travelling and just lives somewhere for a few days.
🦭 The Quiet Days (And the Seals)
Days 14 and 15 are two of the most underrated days of the whole trip. Timaru is a real working port city that almost no tourist visits — which means the Botanic Gardens are peaceful, the restaurant is not crowded, and the harbour story (built by hand, one basalt block at a time, in the 1870s) is genuinely interesting. Then the coastal drive to Kaikōura: mountains on the left, Pacific on the right, and at Point Kean, a colony of fur seals on the rocks who are completely indifferent to your presence. Deeply relatable.
🐳 The Whale
Saturday morning, Kaikōura. A sperm whale surfaces five metres from the bow. It is the size of a bus. It breathes for twelve minutes, then lifts its tail from the water and disappears. The tour guide says they dive to three kilometres. Argentyo wants to know what it thinks about down there. Nobody knows. That is actually the most interesting answer.
✈️ The Drive Home (Sort Of)
Christchurch again, to close the loop. Final dinner at the Riverside Market. Return the rental car in the morning — it has done about 2,000 kilometres and survived one gravel road, the Lindis Pass, and however many U-turns through Queenstown. SQ 298 departs at noon. You will be home by dinner.
Things to expect on this trip
- Your kids will surprise you. Probably daily.
- Someone will eat too much at Fergburger. This is fine and correct.
- The scenery will look fake. It is not fake.
- The kea parrot will try to steal something from your car. This is also correct behaviour for a kea.
- Aghnando will jump into cold water at least once. Let him.
- Argentyo will ask excellent questions that nobody can fully answer.
- There will be a moment — probably Milford Sound, probably under the Tekapo stars — when everyone goes quiet at the same time. That is the whole trip, right there.
Things not to worry about
- Getting lost. NZ roads are well-signed.
- The food. Even small towns have something good.
- Rain at Milford Sound. Rain makes more waterfalls. It's better.
- The 50 steps at Crystal Waters. You'll do it twenty times and stop noticing.
- 25 Dec being "different." It will be different. Different is the point.
- Not seeing enough. You will see enough.
- The kecap manis running out. You brought plenty from St Asaph Street.
The South Island will give you all of this: mountains, glaciers, fiords, sheep farms, great coffee, icebergs, whales, lavender ice cream, and a border collie doing its job with a seriousness that shames the rest of us. You just have to show up and drive.
