Freedom camping

New Zealand shuts down for three weeks around Christmas and New Years. Everyone is forced to take the time off and, because it's the middle of summer, everyone goes camping. We were reluctant to do anything this year because, after two years, Covid had finally gotten into the community. However, at the last moment we decided to do a driving tour of the north island to visit friends and family. We spent a week driving from Wellington to Auckland and back around and, while it was great to see everyone, I really hate driving. We covered 1700 kilometers (just over 1000 miles) and I was very glad to get home.

Of course, because everyone goes camping over that three week period, there's a slump immediately afterward and I got an email from a campervan rental agency that a 2-bed self-contained van was on sale for NZ $95/day. It's normally around $250/day, which I think is ridiculous (I can get a flight, hotel and rental car for less!) so I was intrigued. Wellington celebrates its "anniversary day" in early January (to commemorate the arrival of the first settler ship on January 22nd 1840) so we had a holiday coming up, and we still had some credits from our aborted Queenstown holiday 14 months earlier.

The next thing I knew, we had a 6-day/5-night driving holiday of the south island planned!! This would "only" cover 1100km (about 700 miles) and would include Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Franz Josef glacier and Arthur's Pass. It also meant we could visit Gloria, a deconsecrated church that a friend's son had painted bright pink.

In my head, a self-contained campervan meant freedom camping. With one of the lowest population densities of any country (#211 of 250 countries according to Wikipedia) and one of the highest natural beauty densities (a standard I just made up), being able to camp on public land throughout New Zealand, for free, was considered a birthright. Unfortunately, a few people -- mostly young, overseas visitors -- took the opportunity to travel cheap and leave a mess, which the locals did not appreciate, so in 2011 New Zealand tried to reign this in. Unfortunately,  they left it to the local councils which created a hodge-podge of rules and restrictions with no transparency, so to find out if you could camp somewhere you practically had to go to the site and look at the signage!

New Zealand tried to make exceptions for "self-contained vehicles" (essentially motorhomes and campervans that had their own toilet) but the only requirement was the vehicle needed a blue sticker saying it was self-contained. A lot of people just printed their own sticker and it quickly became meaningless.

New Zealand also has a large number of "holiday parks" which are a mix of tents, vehicles and cabins with communal kitchens and toilets. We've camped at holiday parks several times and they're brilliant, but if I already had a kitchen and toilet, I was affronted at the idea of paying $50/night! In addition, I wanted to wake up someplace where I could see water or mountains, not a neighboring campervan. However, with no real guidance we left it to the fates, and here's what happened:

Day 1: Parked at a holiday park for $48. (I thought it was $24 but it turned out to be $24 per person.)

Day 2: Parked at a  holiday park  but only paid $15 by promising not to use the communal kitchen or toilets. Lovely view of the lake.

Day 3: Parked in the parking lot of the AJ Hackett bungy experience.

Day 4: Parked in a  holiday park for $40.

Day 5: Parked at Lake Brunner for free. Fantastic view.

So it took us five days but we finally figured it out, and it was lovely.

Actually, the whole visit was spectacular. I've got about 130 photos (and a few videos) of the trip here.

After we got home, we got an alert that there had been a covid "location of interest" at the Christchurch airport about two days before we were there. While we were not at risk, it was just a reminder that New Zealand travel was going to become much riskier. Unlike the rest of the world, we really haven't had to worry about covid for the past two years, so this is quite new for us. I expect we're not going to be travelling any more in 2022, but hopefully the numbers will have peaked and fallen and we can travel safely again by the end of the year, in time for the next three-week shutdown.