Green Jungles and Waters of Jade: The natural riches of the South Island's wild West Coast

A Maverick Traveller: The Podcasts of Mary Jane Walker

The West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island stretches for hundreds of kilometres, from the sunny northwest to cold and stormy Fiordland.

It's an area with far fewer inhabitants than the eastern side of the South Island. Far fewer inhabitants, but a lot more rain! For in New Zealand the weather comes mainly from the west and metres of rain are dumped each year in the hills whose streams run to the west.

From the north, the South Island’s West Coast begins, just off the map above, with the Whanganui Inlet west of Cape Farewell and a stretch of trackless coast north of the Heaphy River.

. . . .

South of Ross, we are now starting to get into a part of the country where the hand of European colonisation and even the presence of the Māori, save for gathering pounamu, has only been lightly felt. In fact, all the National Parks from Aoraki/Mount Cook southward are part of Te Wāhipounamu/South-West New Zealand World Heritage Area. Te Wāhipounamu means ‘the place of pounamu’. The national parks are Westland Tai Poutini, Aoraki/Mount Cook, Mount Aspiring and Fiordland; and land in this part of the country is more likely to be in a national park than not

The coast road heads inland, as the true coast is now wild and swampy, with lowland forest and lagoons. There will be no more seaports to compare with Westport, Greymouth or even Hokitika; only the small fishing settlement of Jackson Bay just north of the roadless wilderness of Fiordland. . . .

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/waters-jade-pounamu