New Zealand! So many years I have dreamed of coming here.
My partner and I just arrived to stay here on a year-long Working Holiday Visa (WHV) to continue our ski town lifestyle in a new country. A WHV allows young people from all over the world to come live in New Zealand for a year or two with legal permission to work in the country. It’s a great way to travel around the country and supplement the cost while working. So far, we’re about one month into our trip. Here’s some of our first experiences:
Auckland
We skipped our connecting flight to Queenstown to first stop off in the city of Auckland, located in the northern tip of the country. Our first goal upon arriving in New Zealand was to buy our own campervan, and after weeks of browsing Facebook Marketplace for available campervans for sale, we realized the selection of campervans in Auckland was much greater than that in Queenstown. So as soon as we landed and went through customs, we rented a campervan so that we could knock out two birds with one stone – both housing and transportation – during our first few days checking out potential campervan options to buy.
Why a campervan?! Before coming here, we settled on moving to Queenstown. We read and heard that housing in Queenstown is very hard to come by. It’s a typical overpriced, touristy ski town where wealthy people have second homes to vacation in or rent out to tourists. Coming from a ski town in Colorado, we knew this meant that there would just be fewer housing options here and we didn’t want to arrive and then have to leave if we couldn’t find a place to live. Plus, the campervan lifestyle would give us so much freedom and flexibility to live wherever we want. We wouldn’t have to sign over a year lease and be stuck in one place for a year if we didn’t want to. Lastly, before we leave the country we will have to sell the van anyway, and hopefully we will be able to make back most of, if not all, the money we spent on it. (Ya just can’t do that with rent!)
Before we actually looked at any campervans, we drove about an hour and a half to the west coast on our first night, where we stayed at Hamilton’s Gap in our campervan rental. This quiet and secluded location granted us a perfect location to spend our first night ever in a campervan, with gorgeous ocean views and grass-covered sandy cliffs. There were sweet little cows grazing nearby, and the sunset that night felt poignant – like, hey we’re in New Zealand and we already have such a pretty view.
In the morning, we began our campervan hunt. Because we were looking online so much before arriving, and thanks to our rental (we weren’t super fond of it), we already knew what we didn’t want in a van and so it made finding one we did like that much easier. About 5 days after arriving, we settled on a 1997 Toyota Hiace high top that had been sort of half converted into a campervan, with a bed and table setup, an electric sink, some cabinets, and a second battery for charging our devices. When I say that it was half-converted, I mean that it had the most basic converted requirements that we were looking for at a reasonable price. Living in a van full-time (especially during a winter in the cold climate of Queenstown) meant that we would need to add some additions to the van such as insulation and a roof vent, and possibly a mini fridge, a sine wave inverter to power the fridge, another battery, and some other additions like extra shelving and cabinets to make our lives a little more comfortable. These additions would come with time, after we started getting a regular paycheck.
The other important thing about this van is that it had all the requirements for being self-contained certified in New Zealand. “Self-contained” is the official term for a self-sufficient campervan, meaning that it has a toilet, a fresh water and grey water tank, a sink, and a trash can. Over the last couple of decades, “freedom camping” (or camping in free lots or campsites as opposed to paying for campgrounds) has exploded and caused a lot of problems throughout the country because some campers weren’t properly disposing of their trash or human waste. New Zealand has passed many laws to ensure their country stays clean and protected, and one of those laws was requiring self-containment for campervans who want to freedom camp (since a lot of these places don’t have bathrooms or trash facilities). Thus, since we knew we would be doing a lot of freedom camping, we opted in for a converted van that already had the required certification sticker.
Road Trip to Queenstown
After buying our new baby, we started making our way down to Queenstown. Auckland is in the northern part of the North Island, and Queenstown is in the southern part of the South Island, so during this trip we were able to see so much of the country – and we were absolutely blown away by its beauty. Here’s a map of our route:
We made a pretty quick trip to Queenstown, considering we had just spent a lot of our savings on our van and we were eager to get jobs and start making money. While I do wish we spent a little more time on our trip south, we were on a tight budget and half of the trip (especially along the west coast of the South Island) was thwarted by rain anyway. Considering we spent very little money outside of groceries and gas, we saw some exceptionally BEAUTIFULLLL places. Like I thought living in Colorado was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever lived; New Zealand definitely rivals Colorado and the United States in general, even despite its small size!
In about a week, we traveled by tropical rainforest; cascading waterfalls and ferocious rivers; areas of volcanic activity where hot steam flows out of cracks in the earth; the most epic mountain scenery with gorgeous lakes in the foreground; and two different ocean coasts. Along the way we met adorable flightless birds called “Wekas,” found colonies of seals living off the coast of Kaikoura, and witnessed the bright blue bioluminescence of glow worms. We passed through winding mountain roads with hundreds of sheep dotting the rolling farmscapes. We even drove our van aboard a large ferry in order to travel from the North Island to the South Island. (When driving, this is the only way of transportation between the two.)
This week-long road trip was incredible. During the trip I remembered all the people I met who raved about the beauty of New Zealand before I came out here, and I know now that they definitely weren’t exaggerating.
Arriving to Queenstown
Alas, after many recommendations and research we did on the town of Queenstown, we arrived. Upon first impression, we were blown away! By god, we heard it was beautiful. We knew it was the adventure capital of New Zealand. We knew that there was skiing and a lake nearby. But damn we did NOT expect to have huge jagged peaks towering over every corner of this (not so small) ski town. We didn’t expect a huge lake to be at the forefront of that mountainous landscape, bordering the city’s downtown. We didn’t expect the downtown to be quite so….bustling. We noticed countless numbers of outdoor gear shops and bougie outfitters. We made note of the eclectic selection of unique bars and restaurants. Coming from Steamboat Springs, a small ski town in the northwestern corner of Colorado, this place almost felt like a city!
We were so so stoked. This place looked like the land of good times. And alas, after the second week into our trip, Niko and I accomplished our first two tasks of our adventure: buying a campervan and making the route down to Queenstown. Now for the next challenge: getting jobs and integrating to life in Queenstown.
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