Alexander Scrimgeour

Ship Cove to Bluff. Roughly 1,400 kilometres down the length of New Zealand’s South Island, through the Marlborough Sounds, over the Richmond Ranges and the Southern Alps, across farmland and forest, and out to the southern coast. It took a little over two months, two pairs of soles, a walking pole and a branch, and more storms than the locals would admit were normal.

It started like a holiday. The Queen Charlotte Track is wonderful walking: warm bays, dolphins, and birdsong loud enough to make an alarm useless. By day four, the first storm arrived, and the walk showed what it really was.

Then came the long education. The Richmonds taught me what tramping in New Zealand means. My detour over Mt Angelus taught me where my limits lay, somewhere on the slopes of the aptly named Mt Hopeless. The rivers taught me humility. The Doubtful, the Deception, the Anne, and Forest Creek rose and fell with the weather, deciding which paths to keep and which to erase. Not everyone made it across them.

I spent Christmas in a mountain hut eating dehydrated roast chicken. I saw in 2026 at 8pm, hiker’s midnight, after crossing Waiau Pass in a window between storms. I lost a spoon and ate with a mussel shell for three days. I walked my first marathon day to Lake Coleridge and turned down a lift to keep every step honest. Later, I caught a different lift, holding the bed of a rusted farm truck together in a gale on the way to Geraldine.

The middle of the trail was high country. Open tussock made a lie of distance; Stag Saddle marked the trail’s highest point; and a dawn summit of Mount Hope brought Aoraki/Mt Cook into view on the horizon. That day ended 52 kilometres later in Tekapo, with a tendon injury I ignored until I couldn’t. A physio in Wanaka told me not to walk. I kept walking.

The final third belonged to a group. The trail breaks people apart, then shuffles them back together, and by the Motatapu seven of us had found each other again. We swam in glacier meltwater beneath Mount Earnslaw, where kea besieged our camp. We camped high in a hidden valley off the Routeburn, waded through thigh-deep mud in the Longwoods, and walked shoulder to shoulder down Oreti Beach.

The ending was suitably unglamorous: sewage works, salt marsh, and lorries smelling of livestock and fertiliser. We set off in the dark on the last morning and reached the shore just as the sun broke beneath the clouds.

Along the way there were sandflies, gorse, wild boar, and one well-fed thief of a possum. There were also strangers who turned their cars around, handed over lighters and spoons and fresh sourdough, and asked for nothing in return. The scenery fades and the gear wears out. That kindness is what you carry home.

The map alongside follows the route day by day. Click through to read each section as it was written on the trail.