New Zealand (or Aotearoa in Maori), is a beautiful tiny country located to the east of our home Australia. It’s one of the most popular holiday destinations for Australians to journey to, and Mini got a lot of FOMO seeing everyone travel there. So after convincing Nirry, even though he had been about 10 years prior, we booked our tickets and packed our bags for New Zealand.
As one of the last European settlements, New Zealand is not only a new country, but it’s quite sparsely populated. The largest city, Aukland is home to 1.7 million people, and the country is home to 4.8 million. Each year New Zealand welcomes 3.5 million tourists – staggering when you compare it to the population. In the South Island temperatures go as far as negative Celcius and in summer reach the early 30s (celsius), making the climate perfect for the skiing season as well as summer adventure sports. New Zealand is famous for its beautiful mountain ranges, stunning glaciers, scenic drives, clear mirror lakes, sheep, and of course the humble New Zealand hospitality.
Travelling & Transport
Public transport across the island is limited, and although there a tour buses running through the island, there is nothing better than the flexibility of having your own car and space to enjoy the journey. It gave us the ability to stop wherever and whenever we wanted for photos, food, and just some quiet time. For us, this flexibility is absolutely priceless, and if we didn’t appreciate it before going to New Zealand, we certainly did when we got back.
Accommodation
We opted for a mix of Airbnb and Hotels to enjoy our stay. Overall, you should have no issues finding accommodation in most of the cities of New Zealand as it is such a popular tourist destination. The country is also not very large so you can easily base yourself in a select few places and day plenty of day trips. In cities like Christchurch and Queenstown, you can find hostels to stay at, but we chose hotels in the major cities. In Queenstown, there are SO MANY potential options, but while driving through the city we saw that 99% of them had no vacancies. It is absolutely critical to pre-book your hotel in Queenstown in particular. We will run through our specific hotels, and Airbnb’s as we go through the itinerary.