Road trip around the southern island with a whole bunch of hiking stops. Good to hear that, if I'm not mistaken you've been all over the place! Can't wait but I'm not looking forward to 24 straight hours of travel. Got my brand new noise canceling headphones, hoping that makes it more bearable.
Awesome - the Southern Island was amazing and the hiking was fantastic. Hope you guys have a blast! The flight is long but you get to skip a whole day because of the international date line. And coming back you'll probably land in the US a few hours 'before you leave' on the same calendar date - which is a bit of a trip
Edit: Oh - since you're driving - hopefully you brought\can bring a credit\debit card with a PIN. We ran into some fully automated gas stations that didn't take NZ cash, non-PIN credit cards, apple pay\samsung pay\chase pay. Fortunately we had our debit card otherwise we'd have to offer cash to a friendly NZ to fill up our tank
Gas station:
What do you reccomend? (specifically what cities, restaurants, beers, things to see, things to do)
I went to the Cook Islands (nearby tiny islands) and saw a ton of people from NZ. Thought it would be a great place to visit sometime in the future.
I mean just about anything there. It wouldn't be great for people who are really into cities or shopping but the whole damn place is gorgeous with natural beauty. Oh whats that over there? Just another amazing mountain\ocean view\stupidly blue lake\waterfall\landscape\geothermal spring. No big deal.
As for top things (With the caveat we didn't have time to do the glaciers or the Nelson area):
Orakei Korako was our favorite geothermal spring although most are in a line from Rotorua to Taupo so its easy to hit several
Glow worm caves: Do a private tour to a private cave. We used Spellbound and they lived up to their reviews.
Hikes from Aoraki Mount Cook Village were some of the best of the trip
Lots of great wineries around Queenstown. Town itself was a bit packed when we went. Good place for hang-gliding, parasailing or bungie jumping. High winds can make that a bit unpredictable. My hang gliding got cancelled due to high winds so I ended up parasailing with a later group instead.
Milford sound was fantastic (Didn't have time to do Doubtful sound)
Te Anau was a great place to stay to do a short\early morning drive to Milford Sound
You can (likely) swim with wild dolphins in Kaikoura. Sadly ours ended up being cancelled due to bad weather. We were able to get ridiculously close to some seals though
Food is average. Nothing was bad but we didn't have any meals that really stood out as excellent. One of the things to keep in mind is that a lot of the towns are very small so your variety won't be great. For example: the one meal that does stick out was the Fish and Chips we got from a place that was a Convenience store\Chinese food\Fish&Chips\Ice Cream shop in Te Anau. It was good but doesn't stand out when compared to F&C in Australia\Ireland\Belgium. Another example was Aoraki. Basically you had to buy your food from the town an hour away and bring it with you to self-cater. I think there was a single restaurant there but it was
expensive. Internet was limited to 1GB of data per stay but we had full LTE coverage
What really stands out to me though is how untouched it still feels. We were there peak season and, while the towns were packed, once you got outside of them it all melted away (for the most part). I think Lake Pukaki sums it up for me. It's a large, brilliant blue lake with Mt Cook and Co. as the backdrop. Gorgeous scenery. In the US and many other countries it would be completely lined by houses and mobbed with boats. But we saw only a few kayaks and I think a couple of houses and a camp ground at the extreme southern end. So the rest of it looked like this:
Hands down my favorite trip was Japan.
Japan is high on my list. Now if Amex would just run a bonus conversion to ANA so I could book my tickets...
that's awesome! i wonder if their public transportation is good enough that someone could get around without driving...
It would be pretty tough as a lot of the stuff is pretty remote. You could hit the big towns but you'd miss out on a lot. And driving on the left was pretty easy there. But don't pass up gas stations if you're low as there are some really long stretches without any options