What a great experience! A country with friendly people, stunning scenery and very quiet roads to drive along. We found that New Zealand values its natural beauty and endemic wildlife and their department of conservation, DOC, has a strong presence everywhere. We were surprised at first to find that all the marked trails we were walking along had signs saying No Dogs. This was evident in the South Island along the route to Milford Sound and again in the North in Tongariro National Park. We soon realised that this is to protect all the native species including nesting birds and seems pretty widespread across the country with just some designated areas where they are allowed and still often on leads. It is a larger country than many may think but it is easy to cover quite a lot of miles by self driving. We did about 2000 km in total in our 15 days. There is still quite a lot we missed but we were happy with the route we planned as it included a good range of different experiences. We had good weather on the whole. We were fortunate to have bright sunny weather ranging from 17 to 26C most of the time. We did have 48 hours of heavy rain, often torrential, heavier than I think we had ever seen in England, while on the west coast of the South Island and obviously had to miss our booked helicopter flight. However, we were thankful that we passed through that area when we did, as a day later over 1000 people were trapped, some in their cars initially, by flooding and landslides and were stuck there for 5 days before being escorted out. That would have seriously disrupted our plans if we had been stuck and we would have missed many of the places we had booked to see. So we were very lucky and everything continued to plan, by moving eastwards after that to Kaikoura we had wonderful warm sunny weather again.
There were many highlights providing lifelong, wonderful memories.