As promised, I’m finally starting up on my guide for traveling around New Zealand. It’s been a month since I’m back to Europe and it still feels a bit surreal. I was watching Hobbit the other day and couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be surrounded by such a wonderful nature. Take me back, now!

So we arrived to Auckland in the afternoon of November 3d and spent around 5 weeks camping around both- North and South islands. We have concentrated on the South part the most tho, but I’ll talk about it in my city guides posts. Some of you asked me to talk about all the preparations and arrangements we had to make regarding our trip and more general info everyone should now about when travelling to this amazing country. So, let’s go! I hope this helps:

PLANE TICKETS & FLIGHTS:

We booked our tickets in July, around 4 months before our departure. We haven’t planned much tho, just spent a few days on Skyscanner looking through the best offers and I believe we managed to get quite a decent one. In order to save a penny or two, we got a connecting flight through Guangzhou, China with Southern China airlines.

The airlines itself were pretty decent, we both aimed for vegan food option on the plane and the crew were really understanding and welcoming about it. The chairs were alright also, traveling with cheap airlines for so many years haven’t spoiled me much, haha. On the other hand, Guangzhou airport is a bit depressing. We had to wait for about 7 hours there on our way to Auckland and it was exhausting. Of course, we were too excited about the coming adventures, so we didn’t care that much. There is no internet there, as you need Chinese mobile phone number to connect. However, for some reason I was able to connect to my ETSY shop, which was great as I could do my work while I was waiting, but other than that- you’re out of connection at all times. You can find pretty decent food there tho. Not that great if you’re vegan or have special dietary requirements, but they make all those popular Chinese soups in some of the cafes and accept card payments as well as dollars.

On our way back, we had to wait overnight for our flight to London and Southern China Airlines offered us a free hotel. We were expecting something cheap and dirty, but instead they took us to a real palace, provided food and really took care of us really well. I mean, just look at our room:

I couldn’t recommend Southern China enough, even though Guangzhou might not be the most comfortable place to have a transfer, but you save some money and if you’re like us and are planning to spend more than a month traveling beautiful New Zealand- you shouldn’t be in any rush, right?

CAMPERVAN RENTAL:

From our experience, there are 3-4 most popular rentals in NZ and we booked with one of them. Once again, the price factor was pretty important for us. We decided to go for a cheaper rental price, but get full insurance, so we don’t have to worry about any troubles we might have. Even though we ended up without any accidents or car breaking, it was nice to know you’re protected by the policy that fully covers any unfortunate possibilities. That’s how after few exchange of e-mails, we booked our van with Escape rentals.

We got a decent and clean Nissan Caravan with an automatic transmission. Even though it wasn’t a newest model and the painting was a bit odd (we got some amazed looks from other along the way, which was ok- we like attention, haha), it served us really well even though from time to time we would end up on a gravel road or had to spend a night with a storm outside. We ended up driving more than 6500km with no technical problems, so that’s all we needed!

CAMPSITES:

There couldn’t be a better place for camping than in New Zealand. It’s truly made for traveling with a van or tent and I believe it would be a crime to spend all your time staying in hotels or hostels while you’re there. With a prices as low as 6NZD (for DOC campsite with toilet & water suply) or even free! If you fancy some more comfort or enjoy taking showers from time to time, there are campsites starting from around 10NZD per person with all the supplies you might need. Through the journey, we used RANKERS app called Official Camping NZ which has offline mode as well and almost all campsites are listed with full information on how to find them and what to expect. My advice would be- read reviews before going to the campsite, a couple of times we ended up in a middle of nowhere, because we ignored the lack of responses. Now we know- where is a reason for that!

FERRY:

To take a ferry from north to south you get a few options to choose from. On our way to south we took an evening ferry with Interislander. I love taking ferries as this remind me of the time I lived in Amsterdam and used to travel to see the boyo back in UK. Being stuck on a ship for a few hours has some kind of magic about it, everyone’s seem to be relaxed and excited. So Interislander offers you quite  a few entertainment options during your journey such as cinema, bar, coffee shop, restaurant and Wi-Fi. However, even though we all were offered a free hot beverage, the rest of the entertainment you had to pay for. I’m not saying it was supposed to be free, but on our way back we took BlueBridge which not only was cheaper itself, but also offered free Wi-fi as well as free cinema room where they showed The Gran Budapest Hotel, how awesome is that? The food was also better and we got to enjoy full english breakfast as well as veggie frittatas for a decent price. It’s worth mentioning, that despite all the benefits, traveling with BlueBridge took us around 1,5 hours longer. It’s for you to choose tho!

INTERNET CONNECTION:

So despite the fact that most of my relatives believe that being a freelancer means that you don’t have to work and get to sleep all day, this is far from the truth in my life. I have to stay connected at all times, otherwise it just drives me mad. So for my own sanity getting connected was one of the first tasks we took on upon arrival. After visiting a few local coffee shops we realised that internet connectivity might be a bit of a problem. I am so used to free wi-fi everywhere in UK and Lithuania that I didn’t really researched my options for this in NZ. Basically here you have to pay for the internet all the time, during our trip we only got to a few places where internet is free and unlimited with your purchase, in other coffee shops or pubs you only get a voucher to use their Wi-fi for maximum of 30 minutes and well, that just wasn’t good enough for me. So we ended up getting a 2 degrees data plan. The connection overall was pretty decent, in some of the places of course we were completely out of service, but you don’t really need to check your e-mail when you’re crossing rivers and mountains, right? With a majority of the campsites placed close to the cities it was possible to survive.

WINING AND DINING:

If you’re like me and enjoy eating out from time to time, you’ll find that New Zealand is a great place to fulfil your needs. We used foursquare to research restaurants and coffee shops in the area and found many great places to choose from. I’ll be making a New Zealand foodie guide for you all to see what we got to try! In general, dining in NZ is quite expensive, so if you’re on a budget- avoid even the take-outs as compared to the supermarkets, you’ll be spending quite a few extra dollars here. We used to do a weekly shopping for some necessities and beer or wine, so we’re always stocked if we can’t find a nice place to dine at. Actually, we were pretty good at cooking in the back of the car for the first week or two, but once we discovered that NZ is a really awesome place to eat out- we gave up. So take some extra cash as the foodie in you will destroy you, trust me.

ENTERTAINMENT:

I will be talking more about this in my city guide, but all in all, you just have to decide on why you’re traveling around New Zealand? For us, nature kiddos, we just wanted to spend as much time in the wild as possible. For this reason, we avoided all the tourist attractions and took hikes, drove A LOT, spend a lot of time on the beach, looked for glaciers and falls, swam & drove some more. We ended up not seeing Maori Villages or The Hobbiton, but I don’t regret this at all. Who want to see staged places when you have all that live nature going on? If you want to see some action, just go look for some seals, whales, dolphins or penguins. If you’re more extreme- where is plenty of options for kayaking, mountain biking and of course- bungee jumping. Enjoy!

Here it is! Hope you enjoyed this! I’ll be talking on some more specifics in my next posts, but if you have any questions and want me to discuss a particular matter- just leave me a comment and I will try to respond asap!

Have a good one, talk to you soon!