MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN New Zealand

Riding Milford Road by motorcycle means covering the full 119km that many consider New Zealand's most spectacular stretch of tarmac, between the granite walls of Fiordland and dozens of waterfalls that drop almost straight onto the pavement.

The route was surveyed in 1890 by engineer Robert Holmes, but the project stalled for nearly 40 years amid policy changes. The Homer Tunnel, which bores through the mountain at almost 945 meters above sea level, wasn't finished until 1953 after WWII delayed construction for years; long stretches remained gravel-surfaced into the 1980s.

It's fully paved today, but the fame comes at a cost: this road's injury crash rate runs roughly 65% higher than the national average, so the scenery is no substitute for caution through blind curves and heavy tourist traffic.

Riding Crown Range Road by motorcycle connects Queenstown to Wanaka, climbing to the 1,076-meter Crown Saddle, the highest point on any sealed road in New Zealand.

The road climbs a steep zigzag section from Arrowtown and crosses the Crown Terrace plateau before dropping alongside Cardrona Creek, through a tussock valley between the Crown and Criffel ranges. The final section wasn't sealed until 2001.

Halfway along sits Cardrona, an 1860s gold-rush settlement where the historic Cardrona Hotel, one of the best-preserved buildings from that era, is still standing and open.

Crossing Arthur's Pass by motorcycle means retracing, on modern pavement, the route explorer Arthur Dudley Dobson found in 1864 with directions from Māori chief Tarapuhi, right as the West Coast gold rush broke out and Canterbury desperately needed a direct crossing to the Pacific.

The road climbs to 920 masl in just 5km from Arthur's Pass village, between peaks over 2,000 meters and the Devil's Punchbowl waterfall. The Otira Tunnel, built between 1908 and 1923 for the railway, runs parallel underneath the mountain.

Today the road shares its path with the TranzAlpine, one of the world's most acclaimed train journeys -CNN Travel featured it in 2022- except on a motorcycle you can stop at every lookout.

At just 563 meters, Haast Pass by motorcycle is the lowest of the three great Southern Alps crossings -but also the one that runs through the wildest scenery, through native beech forest and Mount Aspiring National Park.

Long before explorer Julius von Haast led the first official crossing in January 1863, the pass was already a Māori route between Lake Wanaka and the West Coast: in 1835 a war party led by Te Pūoho-o-te-rangi even used it to launch a surprise attack. Today it's officially named Haast Pass / Tioripatea, honoring that history.

The road wasn't formed through to Haast township until 1960, wasn't fully connected to the West Coast until 1965, and didn't get smooth chipseal until 1995 -one of the last major crossings in New Zealand to be paved. There isn't a single settlement between Haast and Makarora, just the Roaring Billy, Thunder Creek and Fantail waterfalls along the way.

Riding the Coromandel Loop by motorcycle along State Highway 25 means stringing together bays, coastal towns and tight bends just two hours from Auckland, one of the country's most-ridden weekend routes.

For over a century the peninsula lived off hard-rock gold mining and kauri logging; most of that stopped only in the 1980s, leaving old mining towns reinvented as tourist stops. Long before that, between 1300 and 1500 AD, Māori were already quarrying basalt for tools at Tahanga, near Opito Bay.

The real shortcut for riders is the 309 Road, an unsealed gravel stretch between Coromandel Town and Whitianga so demanding that several rental companies specifically exclude it from insurance coverage -worth confirming before you go. The reward at the end is Hot Water Beach, with geothermal activity right under the sand, and Cathedral Cove, the country's most photographed limestone arch.

Descending into Skippers Canyon by motorcycle means entering the original mecca of the Otago gold rush: in November 1862, Thomas Arthur and Harry Redfern found about 4 ounces of gold in just 3 hours near Arthurs Point and set off one of the largest gold rushes in New Zealand's history. At Maori Point, Māori miners Dan Ellison and Hakaria Maeroa pulled out 25 pounds of gold, and the town of Charlestown grew to 1,000 residents before shrinking to 400 by 1864.

The road that now winds through the canyon wasn't surveyed until 1883 and took seven years and four different contractors to complete, carved by pick and shovel into soft rock along drops of several hundred meters -at the time, people said more money was spent building it than all the gold could ever repay.

Today it's New Zealand's most famous road where no standard rental insurance covers damage: it can only be ridden under permit and with specific policies. Skippers Bridge hangs nearly 100 meters above the Shotover River, and the whole stretch is a single gravel lane, with barely a guardrail on the curves.

Crossing Rainbow Road by motorcycle means climbing to Island Saddle, 1,347 meters above sea level -the highest point on any public road in New Zealand, higher even than Crown Range Road.

The route was built in the 1950s as a maintenance road for the high-voltage transmission line supplying Nelson and the Buller district, and it now crosses private land on Rainbow Station: there's a toll of NZ$20 for motorcycles (NZ$40 for 4WDs).

It's only open to the public from December 26 to Easter Monday; the rest of the year, access has to be arranged directly with the station manager. Over 21 editions since 1996, the Rainbow Rage mountain bike race used this same route and drew more than 1,600 competitors at its peak.

The ride to Glenorchy and Paradise by motorcycle hugs the shore of Lake Wakatipu for 45km before the pavement ends and 20km of gravel begin toward the Paradise valley.

That final stretch is, without exaggeration, one of cinema's most-used natural sets: this is where the Lothlórien scenes, the Orthanc tower, and Boromir's death were filmed for the *Lord of the Rings* trilogy, alongside scenes from *The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian* (2008) and *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* (2009).

Glenorchy, with a population of just 360, is the gateway to the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks, and in February 2025 it was certified as a Dark Sky Sanctuary: at night, with not a streetlight in sight, the full Milky Way stretches over the valley.

Riding the Forgotten World Highway by motorcycle means crossing three mountain ranges between Stratford and Taumarunui on a road that, until February 2025, held the last unsealed stretch left in New Zealand's entire state highway network; sealing it cost more than NZ$7 million according to a 2017 estimate.

14km past Whangamōmona sits the Moki Tunnel, nicknamed "the Hobbit's Hole" for its narrow, low profile, and the Tangarakau Gorge, with walls nearly 60 meters high, was until recently ranked among New Zealand's worst roads for how slick its original gravel surface got.

Halfway along, Whangamōmona declared itself an independent republic in 1989 after a boundary redistribution left it out of the Taranaki region; today the town, home to just a handful of residents, still celebrates that independence and will stamp the passport of anyone who asks for it at the local hotel.

Crossing the Desert Road by motorcycle means covering the highest 50km on New Zealand's entire state highway network, with State Highway 1's peak sitting at 1,074 meters above sea level, flanked by the active volcanoes of Tongariro National Park.

The bare landscape of the Rangipo Desert formed around 20,000 years ago from violent volcanic eruptions, and despite receiving up to 2,500mm of rain a year it looks like a true desert because of poor soil quality and constant drying winds: the area logs up to 270 ground frosts a year.

In 2000, this same stretch served as the setting for the Black Gate of Mordor scenes in *The Lord of the Rings*; today the southern part of the desert remains an Army training area out of Waiouru, so it's no surprise to come across military exercises near the road.