This week’s travel dream: A solo drive through Kiwiland

To truly experience New Zealand, “you need the freedom to take that road less traveled,” said Carrie Miller in National Geographic Traveler. For me, that road seemed best traveled from behind the wheel of a mini RV, or caravan. New Zealand “unveils wave after wave of jaw-dropping landscapes: one moment serene and pastoral, with golden wheat fields and wide, braided rivers,” the next serpentine and treacherous, winding upward through steep, snow-capped mountains. Over the course of a week, I would drive through the heart of South Island—the larger, less populated isle of Kiwiland—to “feel the enormity” of its countryside.

My road trip began in Queenstown, which has a “mercurial energy that has earned it the title of the Adventure Capital of the World.” Every extreme sport you can imagine, from heli-hiking to white-water sledging, is offered here. A mountain range, aptly named the Remarkables, soars up around the town “in colors that seem lit from within: Yellows flare like molten gold and greens glow like algae.” Within those mountains lies Fiordland, New Zealand’s largest national park and “one of the last wild places on Earth.” I drove through this “raw and primeval place” to the island’s southwest coast, where I came face to face with 11-legged sea stars and “blood-red coral” at the Milford Deep Underwater Observatory, “one of Jacques Cousteau’s favorite places to dive.”

Onward I went, up the coast, to Westland National Park, home to more than 140 glaciers. The two largest, the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, curve “down between the mountains in a gleaming white tongue.” Hiking them is like “wading in a frozen ocean, waves of ice arcing and spiraling on either side and overhead.” As I neared my final destination, Christchurch, I stopped off at Hokitika’s Glowworm Dell, where the luminous insects congregate “like star constellations fallen to Earth.” In Akaroa, I swam with a school of Hector’s dolphins, the world’s “smallest and rarest.” Finally, when my trip came to an end, I parked my trusty RV and reluctantly closed my “personal treasure map”—the Travellers Road Atlas. But I knew I wasn’t finished with the South Island. Fresh discoveries would await me the next time I took the wheel in this enigmatic land. Contact:Tourism.net.nz/region/south-island

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