Luxury hotel holidays to Central South Island New Zealand

An Expressions tailor-made holiday to the Central South Island allows travellers to explore an amazingly varied region of New Zealand. It contains both the dry and flat farmland of the Canterbury plains just outside Christchurch and the highest mountain in New Zealand, Mount Cook, always snow-capped at 3764 metres and is at the heart of the Mount Cook National Park that has nineteen mountain peaks over 3000 metres and where glaciers cover 40 per cent of the area of the park. In between you have the alpine landscape of Arthur’s Pass, amid beech forest, tussock-covered meadows, cool lakes and ski fields. Much of the pasture is for sheep, often hardy merino who provide fine wool for luxury international fashion brands. To the west of the Alps the warm, wet climate produces lush rainforest at lower levels and at higher altitude the rainfall creates the famous glaciers of the Westland National Park; the Fox and the Franz Josef, a wonder of the world in that nowhere else at this latitude have glaciers advanced so close to the sea.