Backpackers now calling Turangi home

Laura Symonds (left) and Robin Gayraud have relocated their international website business Backpacker Guide New Zealand to Turangi. They are pictured at Lake Rotopounamu.

They came, they saw, they liked it, they stayed.

And Robin Gayraud and Laura Symonds like Turangi so much they've bought a house and set up their own digital business from the laid-back town at the southern end of Lake Taupo.

The pair, who are from France and the United Kingdom respectively, have their own business running international website Backpacker Guide New Zealand (www.backpackerguide.nz), a one-stop-shop for young independent travellers visiting New Zealand.

It's packed with ideas of places to go, things to see and handy tips for everything from finding seasonal work to understanding rugby. Funded by advertising, it has around 4000 articles online and has been running for three years, attracting around 2.5 million views per year.

The newest and most ambitious addition is New Zealand's Biggest Gap Year, a year-long journey around Aotearoa that Robin and Laura undertook last year, where they left their Auckland home and travelled New Zealand in a campervan aiming to do 365 activities in 365 days. It was on that trip that they fell in love with Turangi.

"Turangi was actually the place that we loved the most," Robin says. "We wanted to relocate and Turangi ticked all the boxes. It's super-central, has heaps of water close with the lake and the mountains, awesome hikes, awesome people, awesome mountainbiking.
The couple spent five days in the town and it was enough to seal the deal.

"Turangi was just a no-brainer."

Turangi has ultra-fast broadband, which the couple need for their business, and they also liked the feel of the district.

"In the Taupo region it's a bunch of doers and we feel that is the kind of place we want to be in. We had been to many regions and had offers to relocate and we thought here we were going to be with a bunch of people actively doing things.

"The RTO (regional tourism organisation Destination Great Lake Taupo) is working really hard and doing the right sort of things and they're competing against massive RTOs like Rotorua and doing really well, and we really liked that.

We liked that they don't forget about the satellite regions. They actually do invest in Turangi, we can see that with the new i-Site and that was something that was really important to us because we love New Zealand for all the little places more than the big places."

The couple have bought a house in Turangi and Robin says he loves being a 10-minute walk from the town centre.

"It's great to walk down the street and people just say hi. You don't know them, they don't know you, but they just say hi."

Robin says they set up the online backpackers' guide after becoming frustrated with the lack of decent information for adventurous travellers.

"So we looked at each other and said 'let's start one ourselves'. Then we realised how much work it was."

Laura is a journalist and Robin has done just about every job from fisherman to cook. Their latest challenge has been uploading a video of every day of their year-long trip.

That means taking around 250GB of video and about 1000 photos per day and turning it into a video of a few minutes. Robin says at the beginning stages it's taking around 17 hours of work a day to edit each video but he hopes that will decrease as he becomes more proficient. In the meantime, he's just thankful to be in Turangi.

"I'm not complaining. Even when you wake up at 5am and don't see daylight until 10pm, you just go 'thank God for having an amazing job and not doing 9am to 5pm'."