Whenever the conversation comes up about dream travels, New Zealand inevitably takes many people’s top spot. It’s this place with flowing landscapes one after another each as vividly different as the next. While I was in Australia on a year long working holiday virtually every fellow traveller I met had either just come from New Zealand, or was burning inside to go. When my year was coming to an end in Australia I immediately started looking into New Zealand.

I was determined to make it a proper nature experience — which naturally led to shopping around for camper vans. I was initially overwhelmed with the rules around self contained camper van vs a regular camper van. Will I be able to park up for free overnight with a camper van that isn’t self contained? I really didn’t want to get one of these $200 freedom camping tickets that I kept reading about. For more on what camper van I went with and why check out this post.

We decided to fly into Christchurch on the South Island to start our trip off. This was less than a year after the devastating earthquake hit Christchurch and you could certainly still see the effects. We ended up lucking out and finding an available camper van on the side of the road with a phone number in the windshield. For more information on the van we went with check out this post.

We ended up spending 23 days in the camper van. Here’s an overview of our trip:

South Island

Christchurch to Queenstown

Lake Tekapo

Lake Pukaki

Mount Cook

Wanaka

Queenstown

Queenstown to Milford Sound

Lake Wakatipu

Te Anau

Highway 94 to Milford Sound

Milford Sound

Queenstown to West Coast

Up the West Coast – Haast to Greymouth

Greymouth to Abel Tasman National Park