The best way to explore New Zealand (and some may argue, ANY country) is to take to the open road. Road Trips are the best. Renting a campervan is a classic and popular option, but transportation types are a spectrum ranging from sleeping in the back of a station wagon to a full fledged RV vehicle. So while I knew those ends of the spectrums didn’t interest me, I needed to do some research to figure out a la Goldilocks which campah would be right for me.
I desperately wanted to do a converted VW bus, but so does everyone, so prices were high which knocked this out of the running.
We knew we wanted to go Self-Contained because like all great Americans – we value our freedom. We really liked the idea of truly being able to ‘camp’ whereever we could find a place instead of being herded into a small parking lot with other people. Because we’re both one man wolf packs. Now you can just take a converted van, throw a bed in the back and a compost toilet in and call it a day. However, April is Autumn there because it’s a topsy-turvy, upside-down wonderland. The idea of needing expose myself to the near-freezing morning elements first thing every day was pretty much a non-starter for me. Cold is my roughing-it kryptonite. This meant a campervan with an actual bathroom. And bonus: hot showers!
I also knew I didn’t want a tackily marked campervan (lookin’ at you Wicked Campas). I spent a long time combing through the reviews of the popular big rental companies and found VERY mixed results. It was possible to have a seamless, perfect experience, but if something should happen to go wrong, it could really go wrong and put a pretty major damper on your trip.
This is how I wound up choosing a smaller operation, it seemed like the personal attention would be greater than the huge companies. I couldn’t have been more right. Kendrick of New Zealand Frontiers has a very small fleet which he takes immaculate care of and my dream vacation were in good hands with him.
After the fact, we didn’t actually wind up using the on board full bathroom as much as I thought we would. A lot of that came down to the fact that every few days we would go to a public pool to swim and would use the showers there. That said, the couple of times that I did take a hot shower in the van were pretty darn glorious. If the weather had been just a bit warmer – we easily would/could’ve rolled with one of the smaller models with a compost toilet.
But given our constraints our New Zealand Frontiers campervan was absolutely perfect and I could not be happier with this decision.
Here’s our final itinerary for how we spent our 2 Weeks in our Campervan in New Zealand.