We touched down in New Zealand at about 1am on the 1st of January 2020. We started a new decade in this new country, a country which we were desperately excited for. Neither of us had been to New Zealand, but we had heard wonderful things. I write this post about 4 weeks into our stay here, and I can give away that so far it is 100% living up to the anticipation!

In the early hours of the new year, we walked down the road from the airport to a hotel, the most expensive place we’ve stayed at on our trip. Flying overnight on NYE was very cheap, but it did make for a challenge finding a cheap place to sleep and a way to get there.

We woke the next morning to a very different environment to when the sun had last set for us in Australia. It was 10 to 15 degrees cooler, far greener, and far more quiet. Also, interestingly, the sky was covered in a thick haze. The winds were carrying the smoke from the Australian bush fires over to New Zealand – not a small distance. The flight had actually been made quite unpleasant as we had flown through the smoke cloud which filled the cabin with thick, choking air.

We knew that we wouldn’t be eating out in NZ, but for now we were in an airport commercial area with no food of our own, so on our first morning we treated ourselves to eggs benedict and a coffee from a nearby shop. We waited in there for what would be our first of 10 viewings on campervans.

Our grand plan for New Zealand was to buy a campervan here in Christchurch, use it to ‘freedom camp’ for almost free across the country, then sell it in Auckland before our flight. Most travellers go North to South, and we had deliberately planned our trip going South to North so that we would hopefully get the best prices. We wanted the flexibility of a campervan for everything we wanted to do, but the costs of hiring one were huge, easily a thousand dollars a week, so over 9 weeks if we bought a van for $10,000 and sold it for just $1,000  then we’d have broken even.

We saw some beautiful vans, and some terrible ones. The first one, being sold by an Indian guy called Seth, looked as though the previous owner had been a family of spiders, and not spiders who liked to keep things clean. The van was a ‘no’, but Seth was really cool and we chatted for a long time while he gave us and our bags a lift into the city. With each viewing we had a better idea of what we wanted, or what we didn’t want. We had a checklist which we went through for each van, reminding us of all the things we wanted to investigate. On one occasion we opened the driver’s window and found that it didn’t go back up, much to the apparent surprise of the very dopey owner who was listing that heap of rubbish for far too much money. We also saw a van whose owner was apparently ‘away for the weekend’ – the van was a rusting heap of junk under a tree with enough cobwebs to catch every sandfly in Western New Zealand.

We were feeling the time pressure, every day spent viewing vans was a day not travelling. We arranged a last day of viewings and said that by the end of the day we’d have bought a van, though were starting to resign ourselves to a compromise.

The first van of the day was the only one we didn’t find online, it had been a poster on our hostel wall. The advertisment stated that the current owners were the ones who had converted the van to a camper, and had named it Kenji. Ness commented that we mustn’t say anything bad about the van and offend his parents.

We met the owners John and Lucia and instantly connected with this British couple, one of whom was from Andover, only 30 minutes from our home. They had lived in Kenji for a year and we’re clearly very attached to him. He was named after the person they bought him from. The original Kenji has intended to travel in the van, but had needed to leave due to family circumstances, so the van was named after him “so Kenji could still go travelling”.

I got to work looking over the van, with a pretty good idea of what I was looking for by now, and quickly realised that it was mechanically the best we’d seen. We then looked inside and fell in love. Kenji was beautifully made up inside, with lovely woodworktops and a proper full mattress rather than the folding foam mattresses we’d seen in most. I knew right then that I wanted this van.

The only problem was that it cost too much.

We sent the John and Lucia a message explaining that we loved Kenji but that we could only afford so much. We sat nervously by our phones until we got a message back and a huge smile spread across my face – they wanted to sell the van to us at the price we had mentioned, as they wanted to sell Kenji to people who would love him as much as they did. Remarkably they asked if they could keep him for one more night to change the tyres and replace a few worn parts, at their own cost. It felt like a beautiful karmic moment after we had sold Ness’ old car Rudolph before leaving, for under value to a couple who had just arrived back from travelling.

We met John, Lucia and Kenji the next day and exchanged paperwork and keys. They had tears in their eyes as they let Kenji go, while we were quietly excited for the future ahead of us.

We set off in Kenji, and after a little shopping we found our camping spot for the night… A parking area beside a broad bay in the Banks Peninsula, just outside of Christchurch. We lay in our new bed, gazing out of the open back door as the sun set over the hills and bay, excitement flooding through our veins.

Our four days of van hunting allowed a little time for exploring Christchurch itself. I initially felt thoroughly underwhelmed by this weirdly ghost-like city, where there seems to be more gravel parking areas than actual buildings, and a real lack of atmosphere.

Then we looked deeper.

We learned about the devastating earthquakes here in 2011, after which 80% of the city centre had to be demolished. Notable parts have yet to be rebuilt, but a lot of it has been rebuilt into beautiful modern buildings, while many older buildings like cathedrals are bolstered by reinforcement pending permanent fixing. In the aftermath of the earthquakes, many businesses moved into container units, and there is still a cool trend of stylish cafes, bars and shops being based in container units, often surrounded by street art painted on big walls exposed when neighbouring buildings were demolished. The more we saw of this city, the more we saw character, strength and positivity in how it was rebuilding itself.

As always we found a coffee shop of choice, Therapy Coffee, where beaming staff members would greet us with a warm welcome and great food and drinks. We spent a lot of time abusing their WiFi while looking for vans!

After getting Kenji we spent a couple more days around Christchurch, the first exploring the beautiful Banks Peninsula, and the second sampling some of the climbing in the area. We also found that we could get free showers by walking back into the hostel we’d stayed in and just walking past reception and upstairs to the shared bathrooms.

At the end of our time we were sad to leave Christchurch, somewhere we’d started feeling very at home, and we formed an intent to return here on our way back North later in our trip.

We’d decided to head straight to Queenstown, somewhere we thought would be good to hook up with the climbing and outdoors scene and to come up with a plan for the rest of our trip in NZ. We decided to break up the 6 hours trip with a stop at Lake Tekapo, not realising that it would be over a week before we would make it as far as Queenstown.

The drive from Christchurch to Lake Tekapo was beautiful, giving us a taste of the beauty that would come to define our time in New Zealand.

We arrived shortly before sunset, pulling up beside the lake to cook dinner as a golden sun set across the lake. Camping there was prohibited so we drove 10 minutes back up the road to a designated free camping area.  Rising up from the camping area was a long beautiful ridgeline leading to a striking mountain summit. I had seen it on our drive in and learned that it was Mount Edward. Gazing at it on the moonlit night, we decided to make it our first mountain day in New Zealand, a good non-technical warm up to get our legs working again and see whether we were missing any kit we would need.

We set off that morning, having downloaded some maps onto our phones and confident that the weather was good enough to not need a paper map and compass. We weaved around the base to find a path through the foliage, up onto the broad grassy ridge. We followed it’s gentle curves as it climbed high above Lake Tekapo. As we rose above the smaller neighbouring hills we would look down at the sparking turquoise waters of the lake in the foreground, the horizon dominated by the snowy peaks of the Southern Alps in the distance.

We had decided to limit ourselves to 5 hours for the walk, after which we wanted to continue our road journey. We reached a smaller summit at 1500m, below the 1900m main summit, and had lunch there before turning back.

On the descent our bodies clearly reminded us that we are not in the best shape, our feet soft and our legs weak, but we arrived back at Kenji with smiles and a feeling of satisfaction that we were back into the mountains.

The plan to head to Queenstown suffered another setback as we arrived at the beautiful shores of Lake Pukaki. It’s glacial-fed waters glistened in a radiant turquoise under the afternoon sun, with the Mount Cooke range of the Southern Alps just across the lake. The beauty of the scene sucked us in, and we found a secluded spot to park.

We sat beside Kenji and slipped into the serenity of the environment, absorbed by the peace and beauty of everything around us. We stayed the night there, and decided we would spend the next day and night in this amazing place.

The next morning we opened the back door and layed in our bed, spending hours there just staring out at the scene. When we finally got up, we had the most picturesque workout of our travels so far on the shore of the lake, followed by a very icy bath.

We needed a few supplies so stopped into the nearby town of Twizel. This cute little town (a small village really) is pronounced ‘twy-zel’ and apparently residents get upset if you pronounce it ‘Twizzel’, and even more so if you call them ‘Twizzelers’. It had everything we needed, including the excitement of a new table for Kenji so we could cook outside.

Resupplied and full of coffee, we returned to Lake Pukaki and decided to find an even more remote spot further along the lake, with a good view of Mount Cook.

After some hunting we found one, perched on the corner of a small lake peninsula, we felt wonderfully alone. We could now look up the lake and see the towering summit of Mount Cook, the snow shining in the afternoon sun.

We enjoyed a peaceful afternoon and evening, and when we woke had an icy wash and swim.

Having admired it from afar, today we would go to Mount Cook village, sitting underneath Australasia’s highest mountain. At 3,724m it is small by international standards, but it towers above its surroundings and is remarkably technical for its size, with the easiest route up at a Grade III (not easy for mere mortals!), claiming several lives a year.

We weren’t here for something so technical, being unfit and unequipped, but spent the day in the village learning about the history of mountaineering in New Zealand, and going for a few shorts runs to explore some nearby viewpoints. This included views of the Tasman glacier, showing us the dramatic extent of glacial retreat.

We decided that we wanted to do a slightly more engaging mountain route, so with some research found that if we did the ‘Mueller Hut’ walking route, labelled as the most challenging of the advertised walks, then we could do a short scramble to the nearby summit of Mount Oliver (1,933m).

We spent the night in the only campground in the area, outraged that we had to pay £15 for the night, and were up at sunrise to get going.

The walk was a pleasant steady climb up a well made track, before reaching some short snowfields. We kicked steps up and across the snowfields, still icy and crisp first thing in the morning, passing some striking viewpoints of Mount Cook across the valley.

We crossed a final wide snowfield in a broad plateau leading to the hut. Looking across the valley we saw the that the snow of neighbouring peaks was tinted brown – dirtied by smoke that had blown over from the Australian bush fires.

We stopped at the hut to leave one of our bags and some stuff, then set off onto the nearby ridge.

It was an easy but very enjoyable scramble up the rocky ridge, feeling the joy of flowing movement over exposed positions. This sort of fast and easy climbing high in the mountains is probably our favourite sort, and we hadn’t done it since we left home. We reached the summit, savoured the moment then set off back down.

The descent was easy, and we enjoyed being fast, arriving back at Kenji by the early afternoon.

We returned to our idyllic lakeside spot to cool off and wash in the icy water, looking up at where we had been earlier that day. As you have probably realised from these blog posts, I love looking at mountain scenery, I find it absorbing and awe inspiring. I always find it so much more satisfying though when I have climbed something in those mountains – I feel as if I have earned the right to fully enjoy their beauty. The day hadn’t been challenging, but we still felt that evening that we had earned our sunset over the peaks.

The next day we set off to Wanaka, the next stop on our route. We looked forward to this stop, and hoped we might get to meet some friends, but didn’t realise how long our stop there would be, or how enjoyable it would be.