1. Itinerary
Planning the itinerary was no easy feat - there were too many things to see in New Zealand. Alas, we could only go for 6 nights due to work commitment and trying to cover both South and North Island in that time-frame would be a travesty. So which island to choose? With its mountains and fjords, the South Island is usually the more popular choice but the North Island is where Hobbiton is and I really wanted to take Irf there. It is also the geothermal heartland of New Zealand and there would be geysers, volcanoes and bubbling mood pools to see - enough to entertain a 7 year-old boy.
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| A geographical milestone reached - first time in Oceania |
We tried to fit in as many places as possible in a day with a daily cut-off of 5pm to have time to wind down. Here's our North Island itinerary:
21 March - Flight to Auckland
22 March - Auckland to Matamata for Hobbiton (164 km, 2 hours) then onwards to Tauranga, Bay of Plenty (59km, 50 minutes)
23 March - Tauranga to Mount Maui for the beach (9km, 12 minutes) then onwards to Rotorua (60km, 50 minutes)
24 March - Rotorua to Taupo (56km, 50 minutes)
25 March - Taupo to Auckland (279km, 3.5 hours)
26 March - Auckland
27 March - Flight to KL
2. Transport within NZ
There are bus and coach services to take you around the island but for us self-drive was the better option due to overall costs and flexibility. We rented a Toyota Yaris from Apex Rental Cars for NZD350 for 4 days which included zero access, roadside cover and a booster seat for Irf. Comparing to the costs paid by previous travelers, I thought that was quite expensive but that was still one of the cheapest among all the quotations that we have received for that time.
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| Sorting the documentation at Apex Car Rentals office. |
Getting to the car rental agency office from the airport was easy. We called the freephone number and waited at Gate 11 (near McDonalds, Arrivals) for only a few minutes before the free shuttle arrived for the 5-minutes journey to their office on Verissimo Drive.
Total costs for petrol was around NZD100 for 4 days and we relied solely on Waze for navigation.
3. Accommodation
Our itinerary meant that we had to change accommodation nearly every night. We mostly booked 2-bedroom apartments as my mother was travelling with us, using booking.com and Air B&B. Outside of Auckland, there were many holiday parks and motels to choose from. More on our choices of accommodation in this post.
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| A popular holiday park chain with 46 locations in NZ - we stayed at the one in Blue Lake, Rotorua |
4. Immigration and customs
New Zealand's border controls are very strict. Whilst Malaysians do not need visa to visit NZ (thus saving us the hassle of appying for one), customs were an entirely different story. The list of food with biosecurity risks to declare is endless, and this includes meat, dairy products, fish and any cooked or uncooked food. I have heard horror stories of long queues and overzealous customs officers.
The declaration on the Arrivals Card was very general and it did not ask you to list down the items, but earlier at home I had prepared a list of food/medicines for my mom that we were bringing in just to be on the safe side. I am not sure whether it was because of the time of the day (we arrived past midnight) or just our luck, but thankfully our customs experience was a breeze. We passed our Arrival Cards to the officer at the x-ray machines and he asked us what type of food that we had in our bags. After scanning our bags at the machine, another officer requested to check one bag of ours. She gave a cursory glance at our packets of maggi, canned sardines and the packet of uncooked rice. All in all, the process including queuing time took less than 10 minutes. A couple of tips - try to put all food in one luggage and ensure that your prescribed medicine has your name on it.
5. Internet
Heavily relying on wifi, we seldom buy local sim cards in countries that we traveled to. But in this case, exception had to be made as we needed to access Waze. Got ourselves a 1 GB sim card for NZD29 from a Vodafone shop just across the Arrivals Hall. The data was just enough for 4 days of driving and web surfing a night to look for info at accommodation where there was no free wifi.
6. Food
We love travelling in Asia but sometimes having to have to be very careful in what we put into our mouths and the water we use to brush Irf's teeth can be very tiring. Traveling in NZ was a nice change in terms meals for Irf. We could buy from any shop without having to worry about Irf catching stomach bugs, although obviously our choices of food were still limited to vegetarian and seafood.
The downside was the prices. A dish at a normal restaurant/cafe usually cost upwards of NZD15 and the exchange rate with MYR was not so great. Even in the UK where the exchange rate was higher, meals were never a problem cost-wise. We stuck mainly to fish and chips takeaways, McDonalds' fillet o' fish (a worldwide saviour) with the odd kebab and cafe food. For dinner, Pak N' Save was our best friend. This is a low cost supermarket with big outlets everywhere we went to. To complement the food that we brought from Malaysia, we bought fresh pasta, raviolis, ready-made pasta sauce and mushroom soups, salmon, breads, fruits and an assortment of crisps and dinner/snacks for a few nights were sorted.
One thing I could not get my head around was how expensive milk was. I mean, we passed thousands of cows in our roadtrip and I am sure that there were millions of them there. How, then, could a litre of milk cost NZD2.60 to NZD3.50 (the latter for organic)? Again, I was comparing to UK where a litre of milk cost GBP1 and the most it cost for organic milk was perhaps GBP1.50.
So that's the basic elements of our trip to New Zealand covered. It was an easy trip to plan as it's right on the well-trodden path. No extra vaccination to take, no cereal, milk and biscuits to bring for Irf and definitely no language barrier and crazy roads to worry about.
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