Of the ways to see New Zealand with regard to travelling and actually seeing the country, my preferred option is always to travel by public transport. While some people like to either hire or even buy a car for the time that they are over there, there seems little point in my doing so as I am often travelling on my own. And it is very difficult to drive a car and see the scenery at the same time.
Thus, whilst in New Zealand I opted to purchase a New Zealand Travel pass. The option I chose was the 3 in 1, which gave me unlimited travel by coach with several coach companies, two train journeys, and one ferry crossing, for 12 days in the option that I purchased. I used the ferry crossing portion to travel from the North to the South Island on the Lynx ferry, and the two train journeys to travel from Auckland to Wellington, and from Christchurch to Greymouth across the Southern Alps.
If one is in a hurry to get from one place to another over any distance, there is always the opportunity to fly, and there are quite a reasonable number of flights between the major cities and towns.
In certain places the only sensible way to see the scenery, such as in the Marlborough Sound, is to actually travel by boat. Again there are several ferries that operate in areas such as these.
These days, New Zealand acts very similarly to the United States of America with regard to its transport, with perhaps rather more emphasis on coach travel than in the USA, where to fly is often regarded as the norm. Rail routes that carry passengers are now few and far between, in fact in essence there are only three long-distance passenger-carrying rail routes now, the aforementioned Auckland to Wellington and Christchurch to Greymouth routes, and additionally Christchurch to Picton. Both Auckland and Wellington have a passenger commuter rail network. Some of New Zealand's once quite extensive rail network is still open for freight use, in much the same way as in the United States to America.
As someone who grew up in a family where an interest in transport in general, and railways in particular was indoctrinated into one from birth, I found it interesting to discover that Wellington actually still has trolleybuses. Having had fond memories of the trolleybuses in Bournemouth as a child it was lovely to see these clean, relatively quiet, and environmentally friendly buses operating, even though they only seemed to run during the day on weekdays, and not at all at weekends. Such a shame, when New Zealand is able to generate a great deal of electricity through its use of Hydro-Electric power. |
