On Walkabout On: New Zealand’s South Island

I have finally got around to uploading the remainder of the pictures I took during the trip my wife and I took to New Zealand last year.  We started our trip on the North Island in New Zealand’s capitol city of Auckland before traveling around the North Island and seeing incredible sites such as the Lake Taupo area, Tongariro National Park, Rotorua, and the north shore:

After completing our tour around the North Island we then took an Air New Zealand flight to the major South Island city of Christchurch.  The airport at Christchurch really wasn’t all that impressive and actually fairly run down compared to the pretty decent airport that Auckland has.  It didn’t matter though because we got through the airport pretty fast and waited outside for a shuttle bus to take us to  Britz Campervan Rentals:

My wife and I have used Britz campervans before to get around both the Northern Territory and Western Australia and were quite happy with our experience renting a campervan.  My wife and I decided that on the North Island we would stay at hotels and use a rental car, while on the South Island we would rough it a bit and use the campervan to camp around the South Island.  Since it was just the two of us we rented the smallest campervan, the HiTop:

Here are the features that comes with the HiTop campervan:

Features:

• Solar Portable Handheld Shower
• Gas Stove
• Fridge
• Microwave
• Air-Conditioning / heating (Driver’s Cabin only)
• Unleaded Petrol
• Manual Transmission
• Power Steering
• Kitchen Kit
• 1 double bed, 1 single bed
• Radio / Cassette or CD Player

Here is what the campervan we picked up in New Zealand looked like:

Picking up the campervan in New Zealand was actually quite a bit more easier and pleasant experience compared to picking up a Britiz campervan in Australia.  I was in out of the office in less then a half hour compared to when we spent hours waiting to pickup our campervan in Darwin.

Anyway like I said we were in and out of the campervan rental office and on our way on our trip around the South Island.  Our planned itinerary was to do a loop around the island by first going to Kaikoura, before driving over the Southern Alps and the West Coast of the island, before crossing back over the mountains to Queenstown and the surrounding areas before heading back to Christchurch again:

It was going to be an incredible experience for sure and our journey was to begin by first making the drive north to the seaside location of Kaikoura.

Next Posting: North to Kaikoura

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