Detour #260: The Great Alpine Highway, New Zealand
Ben Barry explores New Zealand’s epic coast-to-coast route through the Southern Alps in the cheapest hire car available.
Given the choice, I’d always pick an average car for a fantastic road rather than the other way round, which is fortuitous today – I’m driving New Zealand’s Great Alpine Highway, one of the most spectacular driving routes in the world, in the cheapest rental Hyundai I could lay my hands on.
Officially known as State Highway 73, the Great Alpine Highway cuts from coast-to-coast through NZ’s sparsely populated and breathtakingly beautiful South Island, packing more into its 140-odd miles than some countries manage within their entire road networks.
Feats of engineering, epic views, sweeping curves… there are even snow-capped peaks if you get your timing right.
The first miles out of Christchurch on the east coast are a treadmill of big skies, distant peaks and arrow-straight runs over Canterbury farmlands but a little beyond Springfield things become more interesting.
Peaks start to subtly encroach around me and soon I’m climbing up and away from the Kowai River, the road bending in more challenging arcs to Porters Pass. It’s the highest point of the whole trip at 3,080ft and a great vantage point over this glacial landscape.
A long sweeping descent drops me back down to Lake Lyndon and on through a half-pipe-shaped valley towards the Kura Tawhiti conservation area. With its monochromatic beiges, alluvial greys, dusty greens and mountainous backdrop, there’s an epic sense of scale here that’s more cinema screen than windscreen.
No wonder it’s often mistaken as a Lord of the Rings location. (The closest is actually Mount Sunday, not too far to the south)
Where the 73 meets the Waimakariri River, the landscape shifts again with a vast glacial floodplain fed by meltwater from the Southern Alps that loom above. Now I’m heading into Arthur’s Pass National Park.
Indigenous Maori populations had been crossing this route long before Arthur Dudley Dobson, but the eponymous Arthur is the first recorded European in 1864, and by 1866 he’d established a more formal route – spurred on by demand from New Zealand’s gold rush.
Mountainsides are densely forested and far less hospitable here, squeezing the road, the Bealey River (a tributary of the Waimakariri) and TranzAlpine railway into the path of least resistance.
Press on and you’ll come to Arthur’s Pass Village, remarkable only as NZ’s highest settlement, but it’s a gorgeous region to explore on foot, not least the trails that lead to the Devil’s Punchbowl Waterfall and Bridal Veil Falls. In winter you can ski.
It’s also here that the railway vanishes into some five miles of tunnel through the Alps – a sign of the even greater civil engineering challenges to come.
London-born Dobson passed away in Christchurch aged 92 in 1934, and a memorial a little further south acknowledges his contribution in establishing this route. It’s also where we cross from Canterbury into the West Coast region, NZ’s official ‘untamed natural wilderness’ and the denser side of the pass that takes the brunt of the weather.
As the 73 weaves down to the Otira gorge, I criss-cross the riverbed over single-lane bridges and the four-span Otira viaduct, then pass under both concrete water chutes and the canopies of rock shelters. Finally, as the landscape softens a little, the road finds space to breathe beyond Otira.
Kumara Junction marks the end of the Great Alpine Highway within touching distance of the Tasman Sea, with the towns of Greymouth to the north and Hoktika south. Both offer plenty of amenities, but these remote outposts are hardly charming. Our advice? Book a one-way rental car from Christchurch airport (they are unbelievably affordable) give yourself a night in Greymouth to rest and explore its wild coastline, then hop back on the Transalpine Railway for a fresh perspective on one of the most spectacular routes in the world.
ROADBOOK
CLASS: EPIC drive
NAME: Great Alpine Highway
ROUTE: Christchurch to Kamara Junction
COUNTRY: New Zealand
Distance: 140 Miles
Home to the legendary Bathurst 1000 race, the Mount Panorama circuit in New South Wales is actually a public road.