It's not even a week since I boasted to a friend on IRC about how I'd never hop behind a wheel on my travels - and here we are, proud renters of a "micro camper", a converted Nissan station wagon whose back turns into a double bed. While driving is always risky and driving a rental car is doubly so with the liability issues introducing an economic aspect to the possible disaster, we did the math and decided the money saved by traveling in a camper compared to buses and hostels would outweigh the risks. Also New Zealand seems to be the promised land of such way of travel; every small town appears to boast at least one top notch camp site.
While NZ is all about the great outdoors and mountains, glaciers and whatnot, we're skipping most of that as we're still pretty much satiated with hiking, mountains and thermal sites from Central/South America, where the same stuff was bigger, better and cost a fraction of the price. Instead we have wineries, beaches and hopefully a few Lord of the Rings movie sets on the menu for the trip - all on the north island to avoid the several hundred dollars worth of ferry tickets it would take to take the car over. And having cleared our heads in Auckland for a night over quality NZ beers and grub, we head out into the pouring rain provided by the edges of the oncoming cyclone Wilma that brushed by the north island.. First night of the trip is spent in the back of the car, sipping wine and reading books, thinking about how much the weather reminds us of the summers back home. With the exception that it's warm.
For the first leg we'd explore the Coromandel Peninsula, visiting various places around Hahei Beach for two days after getting stuck there when the floods from the storm closed the only road for a day. Various landslides caused the most famous local site Cathedral Cove to be shut for visitors as well, blah. The amount of water involved was huge, it rained like crazy for almost 20 hours and the floodwaters rose almost 2 meters on top of the roads! On the third day the weather clears up, floodwaters flush to the sea and we continue on to Waihi Beach, a posh seaside town some 3 hours south. Even posher is the campsite we pick, with a heated pool, several top notch kitchenettes and location right on the beach. I've always dissed camping tourism a bit but this is actually great fun!
After Waihi we head south, making a stop at Matamata, unofficially now known as Hobbiton of NZ, home to the movie set from Lord of the Rings saga where a farm on the outskirts of town played Hobbiton, the part of The Shire where Bilbo, Frodo and co. are from. Since they were frantically rebuilding the set for the upcoming The Hobbit movie(s), there were bunch of legal threats about not publishing any photos or up-to-date descriptions of the site online, so we'll not be able to include any of the lovely pictures we took in the online gallery. Duh. Let's just say things were looking awesome and hopefully the ban clears after the movie(s) are out.
Saving the best for the last, we drive down to Turangi, a small town close to the Tongariro National Park which hosts the perfectly conical stratovolcano Mt. Ngauruhoe, which doubled as Mt. Doom in the LotR movies. There's a 7h/18.6km hike trail called Tongariro Alpine Crossing through the mountain pass available, which we obviously book right away. And just before go time the next morning I call them at 0520, checking (as requested) if the trip is still on. And duh, it is not. Thanks to omcoming cloud cover and very strong gale winds up to 120km/h, the pass is closed for business this day. The weather gods of NZ certainly are not on our side! And since we're running out of days to get back to Auckland, we end up missing this experience hailed as one the best single day hikes in the whole country.
New Zealand Recap
Describe New Zealand with one word? "Green" would be my answer. With all the rivers, mountains and lakes in the midst of forests so green it seems to be off the RGB scale, NZ surely is one of the most beautiful countries I've ever visited. Adding to that cost level of that on par with eg. Germany, it's not too expensive either. Yet while it's without a doubt a sweet place to live and work, it's appeal to a European traveler is somewhat played down by all the similarities to back home. All in all, we had a very relaxing 1.5 weeks traveling around in our Nissan "White Lightning" and we hope to be back soonish to see the South Island we couldn't squeeze in on this time around.
See all the New Zealand photos here!
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