#campervanlife
If you’d asked us at the beginning of our trip what we were most excited about, a chunk of time in a camper van cruising around New Zealand was right up there with safari and seeing the great pyramids. For a family who loves little more than camping, exploring and playing outside, the opportunity to do so in the storied land of New Zealand seemed as good as it gets. Which is why it came as such a shock that the two weeks we spent in a camper van exploring the North Island were in many ways the hardest two weeks of our trip thus far. I’ve thought a lot about why, because when you isolate the individual experiences we had, the places we explored and adventures we embarked on, each one was incredible, unique, fun, intriguing….in short, all the things you would hope for. In a year that is dominated by forward motion, bopping between countries and continents, time zones and climates, I don’t think any of us realized how much it would impact us to quicken that motion, transitioning from spending 5 days at a time in any given place to one day, two at the most. Settling into a camper that wasn’t our own felt like a a reminder of just how far from home we really were. To add onto that, for us camping and our time spent in our van is always dominated by nature, finding out of the way places where peace and quiet reign supreme, where the sound of the crickets is the loudest thing around and your nervous system undoes that wonderful energetic reset that only happens when you’re miles from anywhere and surrounded by nothingness. Camper van life in New Zealand is quite different from that, and amazing in its own right, it was just not what we were prepared for. The entire country is dotted with Holiday Parks which are essentially these awesome RV parks filled with cabins that can be rented, patches of grass to pop up a tent, and areas to plug in a campervan or RV and settle in for the night, or the month. There are communal kitchen areas to do dishes and blocks of showers and bathrooms, laundry facilities and playgrounds, slushy machines and hordes of partly feral children roaming around relishing their summer holiday. It’s really quite brilliant and such a cool way to explore this amazing country, it just took us a little while to adjust.
We landed in Auckland and picked up our six berth Maui (How to describe….) a xxxx xxxxx. We stopped at the New World to load up with groceries, hit the Torpedo 7 (essentially a Gart sports) to get boys some mountain bikes, grab a tarp and a headlamp or two, and off we went, first stop Coromandel. Even though our drive was only 160 km, it took us 3 hours to get there as we navigated our giant swaying, creaking, clattering camper van through tiny roads, many of which had parts washed out from the epic summer rains that have been hammering the North Island. The island could not be much more beautiful, starkly different from the mountainous South Island and very tropical in feel, covered in the densest blanket of green with a canopy so thick you can see why the first explorers had such a hard time getting their footing here. The first thing we learned is that not all holiday parks are created equal, ranging from the funkiest of funky to fully set up with pools to play in and hot tubs for hire, and everywhere in between. Our Coromandel hub leaned farther toward the former with lots of cobwebs in bathrooms and some wonderfully eclectic trailer/cabin macgyvered situations available for rent, but couldn’t have been in a more beautiful location, about a 5 minute walk from a beautiful beach with fun surf to be had and a slushy machine. When we pulled into our little patch of grass we encountered about 6 kids with fishing poles and salami who gleefully explained they were fishing the river for eels. The boys were out of the camper and into the fray in about two seconds flat and Will and I popped open a bottle of rosé and tried to figure out where to stash our hard sided suitcases and thanked our lucky stars for about the 100th time on the trip thus far that we only had carry-on sized luggage as I don’t know what we would have done with real sized bags.
In the 36 hours we were in Coromandel Holden fell in love for the second time of the trip, this time with a 10-year-old girl named Summer who had adorable freckles, a New Zealand accent, helped him catch his first eel and was game to boogie board and play in the waves for hours and hours despite the cold ocean and the pumping beach break. When it was time to move onto our next destination Holden collapsed into a heartbroken flood of tears, sobbing that it isn’t even worth trying to make friends when all that happens is that we have to leave them 💔. It was heartwrenching and such a perfect summation of the challenge of this year, calling into focus one of the hardest parts of this constant forward motion. It prompted a long conversation about the challenges of a year like this that is so filled with excitement and adventure, but necessitates leaving behind those you love and those you meet along the way. We tried to cheer him up in the best way we could, with ice cream and surfing, which lead us to our second destination, a place called Hot Water Beach. I feel like this country is filled with geological phenomenon and hot water beach is one such, a small stretch of beach where you can dig into the sand at low tide and encounter scorching hot thermal waters that fill the sand pits and mix with the ocean water to create little beachfront hot tubs…it’s incredible. Add to it a beach filled with really good surf, a tiny “town” consisting of a yummy café, a good ice cream stand and a well curated boutique, and a Top 10 Holiday Park (the Top 10’s are like their 5 star rating, each one marked by nice clean facilities and ample entertainment for the children in the form of epic playgrounds, peddle buggies to drive around, jump pillows to exhaust yourself on and lots of ice cream) and our night at Hot Water Beach acted as the perfect salve for our slightly travel beleaguered selves. From hot water beach we made our way to Mt. Manganui, which will go down in history as the very worst holiday park we found in our 2 weeks of exploring. In theory the holiday park should have been super cool, located at the base of Mt. Manganui, an extinct volcano and sacred Māori site, and minutes from the beach, but it was loud and stinky, with rows and rows of RVs packed side-by-side like sardines and trash cans overflowing with beer bottles from all the very inebriated neighbors. We got out of there as quickly as we could and made our way to Rotorua, a super cool zone (BETTER DESCRIPTION) inland that is filled with geothermal waters, massive lakes and epic mountain bike trails. We spent two nights in Rotorua, passing as many hours as possible bathing in mud and soaking in the sulpheric healing waters the Māori had discovered so many years ago at the Polynesian Spa and Hell’s Gate. We braved the mud and rain to mountain bike though what Huxley aptly named “the enchanted forest”, a combination of Redwoods and native trees that was so thick the rain barely made it through and we could hardly hear each other over the cacophony of locusts and birds. The North Island is rich with Māori culture and we took the opportunity of being in Rotorua to attend a traditional Māori Haka celebration and feast which reminded us of being at a luau, with a distinctly Māori influence. It was loud, crazy, vicious, beautiful and totally captivating as tattooed, bare chested Māori warriors screamed, spun their spears, stuck out their tongues and rolled their eyes back in their heads (imitating what a head looks like when it is cut off). Beautiful women sang songs of the journey 800 years ago from Hawaiki that first brought the Māori to New Zealand and told legends of the oceans, the volcanos, the gods and the sky. We spent a captivating four hours exploring Māori history and culture, playing traditional Māori games and eating more food than we’ve ever ingested until we had to be rolled out and back to our camper late at night.
Our journey then led us to Taupō, a town that sits on the edge of a giant volcanic caldera that is surrounded by glacial waterfalls and natural hot springs. With the forecast calling for ‘heaps of rain’ and six nights of zero sleep behind us, we decided to rent a house for a few nights, regroup, catch up on the few zoom school classes we’d been missing, and hopefully find a good night or two of sleep. Ironically the rain held off until we checked out of our house, but it served just the break we needed, allowing us to cook good meals (our way of grounding and relaxing), do some laundry, go to bed early and sleep late, catch up on our school, and fit in a kayak adventure across lake Taupō to an enormous Māori cliff carving which the boys loved as it reminded them of the hieroglyphics in Egypt. The boys have developed a love of kayaking over the course of this trip and are already talking about when they will be old enough for big sea kayaking adventures down the Baja peninsula…Needless to say, we’re in! As we pulled out of our wonderfully dry house in Taupō the rain set in and followed us all the way to Hawkes Bay, a region of the east coast of the North Island known for its wineries and beaches. We spent the next few nights in one of the coolest holiday parks yet, tucked waaaayyyyyy down a winding road by a little beach called Waipataki, in a torrential downpour. It rained and rained and rained some more. We ventured out in the rain to skim board and splash in the surf since we were wet anyway, and then returned soaking to the mud and dampness to play cards and cuddle in our very damp bed. We braved the roads to drive into Napier to go to the aquarium and grab a few essential groceries, then returned to camp with fingers crossed that the 11 km dirt road that led out to our camp wouldn’t wash out or that the river flowing by wouldn’t run over its banks and keep us longer than planned. While we managed to skirt by relatively unscathed other than a little mud and dampness, unfortunately the Auckland airport took on 9 inches of rain in 24-hours and experienced massive flooding and shutdowns. This was happening as Nana and Baba were trying to fly in and join us for our last 10 days in New Zealand, something boys have been counting down days to since they surprised us with the news over Christmas. Their flight was, unsurprisingly, cancelled and completely impossible to rebook in any time frame that made sense, and the boys had to swallow their disappointment and learn another one of life’s great lessons, that nature rules all.
We carried on to Gisborne and settled into another Top 10, this one situated just steps from the beach where we took advantage of a rainless day to try and dry ourselves out and run through all our loads of laundry. The waves were teeny tiny but perfectly shaped and boys spent all of their “recess” time skim boarding (Holden’s new obsession) and surfing. Not surprisingly they have both improved at an astounding rate, Holden paddling out and catching wave after wave completely by himself and Hux jumping to his feet at every opportunity, starting to figure out paddling himself. It’s wild to think it was only 3 months ago that Hux first braved the waves and got on a surfboard in South Africa and now not a day goes by that they don’t beg to find surf.
We finally made our way back to Auckland, once again in the pouring rain, with a stop in Rotorua to break up the drive and take one more dip in the thermal baths before packing up all our exploded belongings and dropping off the camper van, both excited and sad to be done with the portion of our trip. We are now sitting aboard a little Cessna Caravan headed out to Great Barrier Island for a few days, feeling sadly empty with 2 unoccupied seats beside us, enjoying a (very) brief moment of sunshine before the rain is supposed to set back in. With only 10 days left in New Zealand we’re doing our best to soak up every last ounce of this amazing country which continues to astound, even in its rain-soaked glory.
