This is the answer to every reservation in this guide. Two hours from your front door is one of the great wildernesses on earth. An hour by sea is an island that is almost entirely national park. And the coast between them is emptier than anywhere else you will live.
The wilderness, from your front door
Driving times from Invercargill, to scale against each other. The marked row is the answer to every reservation in this guide: World Heritage wilderness begins two hours from home.
Oreti BeachFirm open sand for kilometres, and cars are allowed on it
~15 min
Bluff & Stirling PointLand’s end: the harbour hill walk and the famous local catch
~30 min
Riverton & the western coastA small seaside town where the coast road turns west
~40 min
Te Anau & the edge of FiordlandWhere the road ends and the World Heritage area starts
~2 hours
Milford SoundThe drive is the event — at its best in heavy rain
~4 hours
Rakiura / Stewart Island sits off this chart entirely — a short ferry crossing or a lighter flight, and close enough that it needs no annual leave.
Fiordland
1.2 million hectares of World Heritage wilderness, beginning about two hours north-west of the city. Glacier-carved sounds, rainforest, waterfalls and some of the highest rainfall on the planet. Most New Zealanders visit once. You would live at the edge of it.
Milford Sound
About four hours from the city on one of the great drives anywhere. Go on a wet day — that is when the waterfalls are extraordinary and the buses are fewer.
Doubtful Sound
Larger, quieter and harder to reach, via Lake Manapouri. Overnight trips are worth doing once and then again.
The Milford Track
Booked out a year ahead by people flying from the other side of the world. You would be two hours from the start.
The Kepler & Routeburn
Two more Great Walks within easy reach of Te Anau, and a lifetime of shorter tracks around them.
Te Anau & Manapouri
Lakeside towns that make a good weekend base, and a glowworm cave under the lake.
Takahē and kākāpō country
Some of the rarest birds on earth live in and off this coast. Conservation here is a live, visible thing.
Rakiura / Stewart Island
An hour by ferry from Bluff, or twenty minutes by light aircraft. Four hundred people, eighty-five per cent national park, and one of the best places in the world to see kiwi in the wild — walking on a beach at dusk. There is the Rakiura Track for three days, day walks from Oban, Ulva Island’s bird sanctuary, and a night sky with almost no light pollution in it.
Southlanders treat it as a long weekend rather than an expedition. That is a remarkable thing to be able to say about a place like this.
The coast and the plains
Oreti Beach
Fifteen minutes from the city — a vast grey sweep of sand you can drive on, and where Burt Munro tested his motorcycle. Bracing rather than tropical, and often empty.
Bluff & Stirling Point
The signpost at the bottom of the country, the hill walk above the port, and the oysters. Thirty minutes south.
Riverton & the western coast
Forty minutes west. A river-mouth town, beaches, and the start of the road towards Fiordland’s southern edge.
The Catlins
East along the Southern Scenic Route — waterfalls, a petrified forest, penguins, sea lions and Nugget Point. One of the best day trips in New Zealand.
The rivers
The Mataura and Oreti are internationally known brown-trout water. Gore does not let you forget it.
The aurora australis
On clear, active nights, from the southern horizon. There are local groups who watch for it, and it is one of the privileges of living this far south.
Further afield
Queenstown — 2 hr
Four ski fields, the lakes and the restaurants, without paying to live there.
Nine chapters on Southland. Everything national — visas, registration, tax, renting, driving, schools, te ao Māori — lives in Moving to New Zealand. This is the region people overlook and then quietly recommend to everyone. When you’re ready to look at roles, see what’s open now.
