How to have the best NZ family holiday in a campervan. Photo / Getty Images
If a holiday can be judged by the retelling of memories, this North Island road trip gets five stars, writes Justine Costigan.
My children have seen a lot of the world thanks to their parents’ jobs and our friends and family living overseas. We’ve enjoyed every trip, but only one is consistently declared the best – the time we took a short hop across the Tasman Sea for a New Zealand road trip.
There’s a limit to the years when kids are happy to spend holidays with their parents. That timeframe shortens further when the holiday involves four people squished into a small space. But if you can get the destination and the type of travel right, it’s a magical combination.
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Clambering up into the double bed space above the cab in our motorhome to tuck in our two girls, then aged 10 and 7, I knew they were exactly the right size and age. Peering into the low-ceilinged space on their first night in the van, I saw they had transformed their high bed into a sleeping cave with books, toys and snacks. It was exactly as much fun as it sounds. So far, so good.
Not being huge planners, we had paid for our flights, plotted a rough itinerary between Wellington and Auckland, booked a motorhome for a week, and figured we’d work the rest out later.
Our goal for this trip was to have as many adventures as possible. From being in nature to meeting new people, trying unfamiliar foods and replicating the simple holidays we loved from our summer camping trips at home in Australia, it didn’t take long to get into an enjoyable travel rhythm. After long days exploring, we would head to a campsite, light the barbecue, eat outdoors then retreat into the van to read, play games or chat until bedtime.
That may sound idyllic, but it wasn’t always so cosy. One night in our campsite at Clements Clearing in the Kaimanawa Forest Park, the wind howled around the van, rocking it so hard our books slid off the table on to the floor. We felt as though we might be swept up, Wizard of Oz style, to a land who knows where.
As we tried to sleep to the distant crack of falling branches, the girls were unperturbed, but I couldn’t rest until the howling faded to a gentle moan. In the morning we peeked out the door of the van to see what was left of our campsite, but everything was exactly the same, as if we’d dreamed the whole thing. We were often surprised by the strangeness of New Zealand – not just another country but almost another world.
By the time we stayed in Clements Clearing, we were already familiar with wild weather and a growling landscape. On our first day, our flight from Melbourne landed in typically gusty weather. “Wear a beanie!” warned our local friends as we walked from our Wellington hotel, bent over against the wind, into the city for dinner. By then, we’d already experienced the shakes in the Te Papa museum’s earthquake simulator and had been splashed by waves whipped to a frenzy in Lambton Harbour.
Later, a few days into our road trip, we squealed as geysers unexpectedly gushed on the trails at Hidden Valley, near Rotorua, and the earth burped and glooped around us, the smell of sulphur generating endless fart jokes (and not just from the kids).
The brief moments of early autumn wind, rain and cold didn’t deter us. As we dug holes in the sand to make our own private spa at Rotorua’s hot water beach, the chill in the air made the warmth of the water even more delicious. And the sun came out when it needed to. At Cathedral Cove, the clouds disappeared on cue, and we pulled out our swimsuits to paddle at the edge of the Pacific Ocean before standing high on the cliffs to wave “all the way to South America”. The reward for our Cathedral Cove hike and swim? The delights of a Jelly Tip ice-cream sold from a caravan in the carpark.
Other unique local foods quickly joined the must-try list. Lemon & Paeroa, Whittaker’s chocolate (hard to find in Australia at the time), New Zealand’s unbeatable version of “fush and chups”, and the all-time classic – Hokey Pokey ice cream. Strangely, the girls were reluctant to try it. I had jokingly told our youngest she would be asked to “do the hokey pokey” before anyone would offer her a scoop, and she took me seriously. When she realised no one in New Zealand was doing the hokey pokey in order to get an ice cream, I was the subject of all the fury and righteous indignation an under 10 can muster. The flame of that betrayal still burns.
Trying new foods, or the New Zealand version of familiar treats, was a highlight. We often drove past farmers’ trucks selling fruit and vegetables by the road and picked up overflowing punnets of raspberries, stone fruit and excellent veges for a few dollars each. That fruit was the perfect road trip snack, topped only by the smoked fish from Blackbeards Smokehouse in Thames. Too tired for a picnic, we ate the fillets of smoked meat straight from the packet as we drove our final stretch to Auckland. No gourmet treat has ever surpassed it.
Even on the Coromandel Peninsula with its gently winding roads lined by humble baches, we were astonished by the beauty and drama of the landscape. After a week of driving through farmland and forest, over mountains, by the coast and through some of the North Island’s many national parks, we never became complacent.
At Clifton Motor Camp in Havelock, we parked the van a few metres from the beach and woke as the sun was rising behind Cape Kidnappers, bathing the bay and the mountains in gold. In front of us the flinty beach offered distant views to Napier, a scene that after a couple of days exploring national parks seemed like the New Zealand version of the ‘Big Smoke’. We felt as far away from anywhere as we’d ever been.
Our motorhome opened up the North Island to us exactly as we hoped and we collected stories wherever we went: The time we backed the truck with a loud thump into something hard, adding a couple more centimetres of bend to the already mangled pole; when an unwelcome interest from a very hairy cow – unlike anything we’d ever seen at home – sent the girls screaming back to camp for comfort, or when we headed late at night into a forest not knowing if we had enough petrol to make our way out again, scared and wondering if we were the world’s most irresponsible parents.
Locals gave us a few stories, too. Keen to try out the Aussie lingo, they took joy in pulling out the Australian cliches for our benefit. “Fair suck of the sauce bottle, mate” is not an expression I hear at home very often, but our Kiwi cousins seemed to have adopted it with glee. “What does it mean, mum?” one of the kids asked me in a shop, and I whispered back. “I have absolutely no idea.”
In return we learned more about Māori and New Zealand history and culture, including a few words of local slang, which came in handy when it was time to go home. As we headed to the airport to catch our flight home, various people asked us if we’d had a good time. There was only one possible answer. “Choice, bro.”
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