We arrived in New Zealand on Saturday 22nd March after a mercifully short 3 hour flight from Sydney. It was at Sydney airport where, for the first time ever, Louise and I were called by name for our flight as being one of the remaining passengers to board. In our defence they were boarding early and we were already walking up to the gate when we heard our names so we were not ridiculously late.
Upon arrival in New Zealand we headed straight to our hostel in Auckland called Station Backpackers, situated on the fifth floor of what used to be a hotel. The decoration was mismatched and slightly bizzare but it was good enough for two nights. At least my bed was comfy and the people sociable.
As we had not planned anything prior to our trip to New Zealand, once we were at the hostel that was our primary activity. We had to decide what we really wanted to see and how we wanted to go about it in the extremely limited time we had. Two and a half weeks is not enough to see New Zealand but we did manage to squeeze in a fair amount. Both of us wanted to try and see the North and South Islands, spending more time in the South. After throwing around what felt like a million different ideas and suggestions we came up with what felt like a viable plan. We would drive the North Island ourselves over the course of three days and then we would join the Kiwi Experience bus on the South Island to do their Southern Round-Up package.
Therefore, on Sunday we visited the Kiwi Experience office, which was handily on our street, to book our tickets. Luckily the tour we wanted to do happened to be on sale and we got it for half the quoted price. Once this was booked we trundled off to all the car hire places, also on our street, to try and find a place that would agree to a one way trip. A couple of places were not open to the idea or ridiculously expensive and the third one we tried would let us have a car but wanted NZD150 to tow the car back from Wellington which wasn't really feasible for our budgets. Starting to think that this idea may not work we ended up in Apex Car Rentals seeing what they could do for us.
It seemed our luck struck once again as they offered us a relocation deal for one of their cars they wanted in Wellington, our final destination. The car hire was NZD25 a day and taking out the full insurance raised this to NZD40 per day. Hiring the car for three days and paying for the tank of petrol with 20% discount from garage prices cost us just over NZD200 - around £50 each. Excitingly, our last minute plan was finally coming together.
With the car collection organised for Monday morning we spent the rest of our afternoon looking around Auckland, a city I wasn't overly enamoured with. It felt extremely empty, there were not that many people anywhere and pretty much no traffic could be seen.
Our evening was spent looking at where we wanted to go on the North Island, looking up routes and booking places to stay.
Until next time.
A x
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