Summary

Immediately following our 2018 Great American Roadtrip, my wife Claire and I took 6 weeks to travel around the North Island of New Zealand. We thought it would be a nice way to say hello to New Zealand before looking for work on the South Island with our working-holiday visas, and it was.

Map

I built an interactive map of the roadtrip using Folium/Leaflet.js. Check it out:

• link

Notes:

• It is optimized for a computer screen rather than a smartphone screen.
• The best way to see trip photos is through the map. Enable the “Facebook posts” layer, and click on the areas you’re interested in.

Motivation

We had a few separate motivations for taking this trip.

While Claire and I had both previously lived on the South Island, we had only spent a few weeks on the North Island, and we felt like we wanted to get to know it a little better. Plus, we have a number of friends scattered around the North Island who we hadn’t seen in years.

We knew we wanted to buy a car in NZ, and that the used-car market is biggest in Auckland. It felt logistically simple to buy a car there and drive it around the North Island for a while, before taking the ferry to the South Island.

Finally, we knew we would spend most of our working-holiday visa on the South Island, so the timing felt right to start by traveling around the North Island.

The trip itself

Our itinerary was not the typical tourist itinerary, because we had seen many of the main tourist attractions already. We balanced our six weeks among the following activities:

• visiting friends (in Auckland, Taranaki, Whanganui, and Wellington)
• exploring parts of the North Island we had never seen (Northland, the Coromandel, the East Coast, Taranaki)
• tramping (in the Ruahines, in the Tararuas, and canoeing down the Whanganui River)

Reflections

Compared to our Great American Roadtrip, this trip was much smaller in scope and much more relaxed. It was vacation, not travel. We mostly had fun, and there were only a few moments when we wanted to kill each other :P

The biggest impact of this trip was to give me a new appreciation for the North Island. I had previously considered it an obvious second-best to the South Island, in terms of general awesomeness and desirability as a place to live. This trip changed my mind. To quote my friend Giselle: “The North Island is not less beautiful than the South Island but rather differently beautiful.” Just as the South Island has elements (wildlife and terrain) that can’t be found in the North Island, so the reverse is true too. I am now deeply appreciative of the North Island’s magnificent kauri forests, sand dunes, and high desert; I have a newfound love for Auckland as a city (and a deeper love for Wellington); and I have new respect for North Island tramping from our insanely windy trip to the Ruahines and our challenging, highly technical, and very rewarding trip down the Main Range of the Tararuas.

By the numbers