South Island and Hitchhiking

if you are on the great walks, you should have booked already for many of them. Not absolute peak but still plenty of people about.

you may get lucky with pickups from track ends, but if not you'll be stranded. Better to arrange shuttle bus transport, there are lots of services for hikers and they don't cost that much. Not always a good idea to leave cars at trailheads anyway.

Have you booked the ferry from Wellington to Picton yet? If not, I would try do that as soon as, because the ferry has been really busy this Summer.

As the previous responder said, if you're doing any of the Great Walks, you should have booked them already. Get onto the Dept. of Conservation (DOC) website (www.doc.govt.nz), plenty of info and advice on walks there.

Three to four weeks should be a good amount of time, you'll have to be selective about what walks you do, and I'd recommend shuttle/bus/car to get around (as opposed to hitching). If you're heading to Christchurch, how about doing one of the Banks Peninsula walks, and take advantage of having family around to drop off/pick up?

February is still high season in NZ, so book what you can in advance. If you enjoy camping, try staying in some of the DOC campgrounds...there are some beautiful sites, off the beaten track, around Queenstown and right up the West Coast.

There are also walks which you don't have to book in advance, for example the Queen Charlotte Track near Picton.
Hitchhiking is pretty easy in NZ (as anywhere there is a small risk), the hitchhikers we picked up during our travels never had to wait long.
4 weeks is a reasonable amount of time, especially if you're going to spend most of it on the south island.

My husband and I spent 6 week on the South Island in late Feb. and March of 2013; by that time the tourist crowds are gone and we didn't have much trouble finding accommodations. As everyone has said, Great Walks should be booked in advance, however there are a lot of beautiful hikes which are not one of the "Great Walks" (but they are still great walks!) and you can get a 6-month hut pass which will let you stay in an unlimited number of DOC huts--last year it was $92 NZD for the pass, or you can pay $10-$15 at each hut without the pass. We purchased the pass and definitely got our money's worth from it! We never had trouble finding beds in these huts and never reserved in advance. Sometimes we had huts entirely to ourselves. Stop at a DOC office to pick up a hut pass and get trail info. If you want to do the Abel Tasman Track and it's booked up, you can do the Inland Track in the park which is still beautiful, no reservations needed. In March of 2013 we hiked it and only saw one other hiker and had the huts entirely to ourselves every single night.

For transportation we bought a 17-trip pass on http://nakedbus.com/nz/bus/ and used that for most of our inter-city travel, and hitchhiked wherever the bus did not go (trailheads, etc.). Hitch hiking was very easy; we always had rides within a few minutes and everyone was friendly. You can see a lot in 4 weeks, but of course you'll always wish you had more time. We spent 6 weeks and could easily have stayed twice or three times as long. For more details about some of our experiences I just wrote about it in my Christmas letter on my personal blog; here's the link:

http://www.lilyannfouts.com/holiday-letter-2013/
Have fun!

Hey! My name is Jay and i am from germany. Am on holidays here and just finished my tobacco. As its extremely expensive here i am looking for someone who can bring me some tobacco from the duty free shop. Of course i will pay for the tobacco and also pick you up from auckland auirport and drive you to your destination. Let me know if this sounds good to you!
Cheers, Jay

jonooh @ web.de