CURIO BAY, New Zealand — As a chilly dusk fell on this tiny bay famous for wildlife and Jurassic-era fossilized trees, a white-coated figure waddled gingerly across tide-slicked rocks — me, trying to get out of sight to prevent scaring off yellow-eyed penguins I hoped would come ashore.
A 2-foot-tall penguin popped out of the ocean, gave me a puzzled stare from its lemon-hued eye, and marched to its nest in the cliffs.
First settled by Maori around 950 and by Europeans 900 years later, the southernmost part of New Zealand’s South Island is so pristine it’s a toss-up who feels most surprised in meeting, you or the wildlife.
During an eight-day drive along the 380-mile two-lane Southern Scenic Route, I watched some of the world’s rarest penguins commute home, rode horses across rivers where “The Lord of the Rings” was filmed, and sailed in fjords and hiked mountain trails among tree-sized ferns and moss-draped beech trees that looked like giant bonsais.
I started in late June (winter in the Southern Hemisphere) in Queenstown, a buzzing ski-and-outdoors town on a turquoise lake, and ended in the stately Edwardian city of Dunedin, with a detour to its Otago Peninsula and up to Moeraki.
From Queenstown to tiny Te Anau, the gateway to Fiordland National Park, snow-capped ranges cascade to the horizon. In their expansive shade, I trotted by horse along a fast, steely river near Glenorchy and hiked a few miles of the Alpine Routeburn track, starting through a rainforest of draping moss and ending by a tarn at Key Summit with peaks 360 degrees around.
Imagine mixing Hawaii with the Alps, then magnify it by a million: 3,000-foot ridges tumble into the still, dark waters of Milford and Doubtful sound, where it rains about 22 feet a year and waterfalls sprout everywhere.
The car-antenna chewing kea, the world’s only alpine parrot, lives here, as do dolphins and seals in large colonies where the fjords end in the Tasman Sea. Tourists flock to Milford with its picture-perfect Mitre Peak, but Doubtful Sound is three times as long and its remoteness far more mesmerizing.
Along the southern and eastern coasts, the mountains fade into ubiquitous sheep pastures. Deserted beaches stretch out, from the pebble-covered Gemstone Beach near Riverton to the sandy half-moon of Tautuku Bay in the Catlins region, where dirt roads meander past farms shielded by thick tree stands doubled over by the winds.
It was here that I saw my first hoiho, as yellow-eyed penguins are called in Maori, one of only 2,000 estimated to exist. Farther up the coast at Katiki Point, I happened upon their evening rush hour and watched half a dozen paddle out of the ocean after a day of fishing, preen, then hurry up the cliffs as their mates called out.
