To say that New Zealand is just beautiful is an understatement. It’s ridiculously stunning and absolutely perfect. In the two weeks I spent traveling around the South Island with my oldest brother, Jacek, and his best friend, Jordan, I completely fell in love. Snow-capped mountains, glacial lakes, fiordlands, and of course the endless fields of sheep, I believe our word of the trip was “wow.”
If you’re looking to visit New Zealand, which I would encourage EVERYONE to do, I’d really suggest carving out at least two weeks. Originally we had planned to spend most of our two weeks on the South Island, as we had heard there was more to see and do, and end our last few days on the North Island. Since we were traveling in a campervan, we really had to plan out each of our destinations, distance and timing wise. We allotted additional driving time to our route since we were basically driving what felt like a giant bus on windy, New Zealand roads. By the end of our trip we realized it was going to be too ambitious to take the ferry and drive up the North Island in two days, so we ended up staying on the South Island for the whole trip.
Renting a campervan or car is definitely the way to travel around the country. The South Island has some beautiful towns to explore, but it’s outside these places that you find the true magic of New Zealand. There are so many campervan and car rental companies in New Zealand that it’s not a problem finding something to fit your needs. After weeks of comparison researching (thanks, Jacek!) we found our perfect campervan with Britz Campervans. This beaut, which we appropriately named Smeagol, came fully loaded with room for four, a kitchen, bathroom, fridge, and even wifi! It was a great van and was definitely one of the more outfitted ones compared to many others we saw on the road. It can be annoying to have to deal with having to dump waste water every other day with a huge campervan. Having one that was “fully-loaded” gave us the ability to freedom camp, which helped cut down costs on paying for campsites!
Once we got a full tour of our campervan, we were given our TomTom GPS tablet that would help us navigate our journey, find campsites, and more. We had a love/hate relationship with the TomTom (more hate than love) and definitely don’t recommend using it as a personal device. BUT, since it came with the van, we put it to good use throughout the trip, especially when we needed to stock up our fridge and pantry. Insert Pak’nSave– the Costco of New Zealand. New Zealand is expensive and knowing we’d be on the road for two weeks, we definitely could not rely on eating out for every meal. Pak’nSave is THE place to go to stock up on food for reasonable prices. It was fun roaming the aisles and seeing what produce they had, and confusing the employees when asking for eggs because they pronounce it “iggs.”
About a three hour drive from Christchurch was our fist destination for the night, Lake Tekapo. It is the second-largest of three lakes that run north to south along the Mackenzie Basin (others are Pukaki and Ohau.) The Godley River feeds into the lake, which gets its water from the Southern Alps. We were lucky enough to visit Lake Tekapo during the blooming stage of the famous lupins, which surround the shores of the lake between mid-November and December. The views of the lake, lupins and distant Mount Cook were magnificent and a great end of our first day in New Zealand!
While the lupins are incredibly beautiful to admire, we learned that they are actually an aggressive weed that impacts the surrounding ecosystem. The dense strands of the lupins shade out other plant communities hindering their growth, keep predators hidden threatening nesting and feeding birds, and form steep banks on rivers from their roots making the area unsuitable for wading birds to feed.
One super helpful app that we used to find campsites each night was called Campermate. Not only does it source all of the campsites around your area, it identifies them as freedom campsites, Department of Conservation sites, or other campgrounds. This helped us plan our routes so we could always end our days at freedom campsites, when possible. Not only does the app help find sites, it also alerts you of road conditions, things to do, closest dump stations for water, etc.
When we arrived at our first freedom campsite, there were no other cars in site and we had no idea whether or not it was truly a place to camp or not. If you freedom camp outside the designated areas, you can get a fine, and that was not how we wanted to start off our trip. Luckily one other van showed up later in the evening, so we finally relaxed and enjoyed some New Zealand beers and burgers to celebrate our trip!
The next morning we woke up very early since Jacek and Jordan were still on USA time. Jacek and I watched the sunrise, made some breakfast and then headed back on the road to our second destination, Lake Pukaki. Only a 45 minute drive from Lake Tekapo, the views of Lake Pukaki were amazing. It’s infamous turquoise color comes from finely ground minerals that are carried from the glacier-fed waters. The lake overlooks Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park with stunning views of Mount Cook/Aoraki- New Zealand’s highest peak at 12,316 feet.
Only a 25 minute drive from Lake Pukaki, Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park was our next stop of the day. The park is named after its highest mountain- Aoraki/Mount Cook. Aoraki is the original Maori name meaning “cloud piercer.” The English name honors Captain James Cook, the 18th century navigator that first circumnavigated New Zealand and claimed it in honor of the English Crown.
There are multiple treks you can do in the park ranging from day to multi-day. We opted for a day trek on the popular Hooker Valley Track. This trek takes three hours and leads up the Hooker Valley, along the Hooker River and ends at a glacier lake. All along the way there are impressive views of Mount Cook and the surrounding park. We witnessed two small avalanches as we started our hike, which were amazing to see and thankfully were witnessed from a very far away distance. The track is mostly flat but there are three swing bridges to cross that are very, well, swingy. Crossing those on a windy day was a fun adventure for us!
We were lucky enough to find a freedom camping spot right on Lake Pukaki and spent the rest of the evening watching the sunset and enjoying our campfire. On our third day, our mission was to make it to Queenstown. About a four hour drive with stops, we passed through lupin fields, turquoise colored rivers, and even stopped at a glider airport as Jordan is a pilot!.
As this was the last stop on my epic adventure, I was taking in every day and really enjoying the time I had left abroad. We were only on day three and I had already fallen in love with New Zealand. We still had so much left to see and I already knew I wanted to come back to visit again one day.
I have so many wonderful pictures from New Zealand that I didn’t want to cram everything into one post. I’ll be posting the rest of my New Zealand adventure in the next coming weeks!