New Zealand Part 1: We Bought a Van!
Kia Ora! We are here in New Zealand. Our first week and a half has been centered around buying a van and exploring around the northern half of the north island.
We lined up a few of our favorite vans for showings the first day we arrived. The first van we saw was owned by Brazilians who spoke Portuguese and no English. We used Google translate to communicate with them on the side of the road. While this was our favorite van on paper, it was underwhelming and felt really small and dark inside. We decided to pass on this van which was great because it saved us from needing to paint over the “Keep Tassie Wild” decal painted over the back of the van.
The next van was owned by a French guy and we met him in the parking lot of the Countdown grocery store. He claimed his English was not very good, but no Google translate was needed so we felt Iike this was a win. Grady drove it around the parking lot and although he nearly backed into a Tesla in the process, he said it drove well and we decided to take it for a pre-purchase inspection.
An hour and a half later the 3 of us walked in to hear the “findings” from the inspection - the French sellers jaw dropped when he heard 12 findings. Turns out the van is in great mechanical condition, but hasn’t been serviced in years and had no oil, black sludge only for power steering fluid, and needed new radiator and brake/clutch fluid and spark plugs. The mechanic said that after a proper service she’d be “tip top” (one of the many fun kiwi expressions). We negotiated the price based on the findings and settled to buy it on Saturday night.
After one night of staying in the Central Business District of Auckland, we decided we needed to get out of the city center and stumbled upon an amazing neighborhood called Howick Bay / Bucklands Beach. We booked an airbnb that had orange trees in the back yard & it was so peaceful and a nice change of pace from the crowded parking garages of Auckland. Our Airbnb host said to “sing out if we had any queries” - it doesn’t get better than that. We walked to the beach and walked to dinner in town. The beach was wildly flat and lined with the New Zealand Christmas trees that were in full bloom called the Pohutukawa trees. They look kind of like broccoli when they aren’t in bloom, but they bloom with vibrant red flowers right around Christmas and it’s beautiful to see. The other best part of this area was a breakfast place called Books n Bricks cafe that had the best brekky (another NZ gem of a saying) sandwiches we’ve ever had. It was so good that we went back twice in a few days for brekky sandwiches and flat white coffees. The coffee artwork was remarkable! We loved this sleepy little beach town right by the city and would come back in a heartbeat.
From there we ventured on to Waiheke Island. It actually worked out well that we hadn’t bought the van yet because we were worried about parking it in one of the Auckland parking garages. It was down pouring rain when we arrived for the ferry and looking ominous out over the harbor. We sat with a fun group our age from England visiting their friend in Auckland and the kiwi said to everyone, “Don’t forget your bits and bobs!” When we arrived in Waiheke the sun was shining and it was beautiful for our bus ride across the island. The AT bus was quick and easy and dropped us off within a 2 minute walk from our airbnb. It felt like a little oasis in the jungle. The entire island was a mix of California / Oregon coastline, Hawaii Beaches. and narrow St. John roads. On the first night we had fish n chips at 3 fishes, wine at Postage Stamp Winery, and split Italian style pizza and gelato at la dolce vita - all of which were amazing.
It rained all night which was great given most of Waiheke Island uses rain water for their residential water supply and you see collection vats all over the island - some covered in beautiful jungle moss. The next day we walked all around the island and were blown away by the steepness of the driveways everywhere on the island. Plus, Grady couldn’t figure out their color coding convention for the rubbish and recycling bins so that mystery of the rubbish bin lids continues to this day.
We walked up to the vineyards and enjoyed wine at Mudbrick Vineyards & Cable Bay. The views and wines were stunning! We capped off a fantastic day with meat pies at the ferry dock before heading back to Auckland to buy the van. We are heavily leaning into the meat pie culture here and are all about it.
The visibility on the ferry was remarkable and it felt like a totally different experience than our socked in, rainy view on the way over. Our first step was buying a jig saw off of a guy on Facebook marketplace to use for our known van renovations and then we bought the van on the side of a road in a very nonchalant manner. It’s easy to buy a van here - you just pay the person and file a simple change of ownership paper at the post office. We now have our van! She needs a lot of work though…
We bought the van for about half of the max we wanted to spend on a van so we decided that with the quality mechanical condition, price, and minor work needed - we could take on a few projects to dress her up! We felt like spending less on the van and putting in a day of work would help reduce our potential loss when it comes time to sell. We strategized on the exact renovations to pursue at our Airbnb and knew that tons of cleaning, new curtains, updating the storage cabinet, adding shelves, resurfacing the kitchen surfaces, and a new mattress topper, pillows, and cookware would go a long way.
We threw out 4 trash bags of junk immediately and donated some of the nicer stuff. There was very limited storage and WAY too much stuff. After a few trips to Bunnings (like Home Depot) and the Warehouse (like Walmart), we had the van mostly situated enough for our first adventure.
We threw a little oil in the engine to tide ourselves over until our upcoming car service appointment and hit the highway north towards Bay of Islands. It was raining most of the drive, but sunny when we arrived! We got to our cute airbnb in Bay of Islands on NYE and couldn’t have been happier to realize it was 2 blocks off the water and a short walk to town. We decided to walk into town to find a fun beach restaurant for dinner and couldn’t have picked a better place. We ate at the Tipsy Oyster, a fun tapas restaurant on the water with live music and awesome food. The calamari was the biggest calamari ever and we even ate goat as one of the specialities. In no surprise though, we couldn’t stay up for the fireworks…
The next day was bright and sunny and we did a bit of van organizing before leaving the airbnb. Our hosts were super friendly people originally from Norway. We did a lot of work on the van at a local park including building and installing the shelves, putting the final hack saw touches on the storage cabinet, and more - all with a tiny little hammer and super limited tools. We’re super happy with how it turned out, but if you account for our limited tools & time, it’s even better!
We drove further north into the Northland area from there. The high plains near the cliff-like coasts were stunning. We ate a picnic dinner at the beach and spent our first night in the van! There are little string lights in the van and they are the most happy surprise of all things to come with it. We did a sunrise hike to a point with a beautiful view and were back to camp in time for breakfast on the beach. We had been discussing if we should get a roof box to add storage and keep our stuff organized and night 1 made the decision very clear. We didn’t want to look like hoarders with belongings piled high any longer. We started browsing used roof boxes in Auckland over coffee. We found cross bars and a box and lined up pick up times for the next day before our car service. We went to two waterfalls and then the Waipu Glow Worm Caves, which totally exceeded expectations. The caves weren’t without adventure though… I thought that the trail went up and around instead of starting in the knee-deep water filled cave. We ended up doing a second hike on the day unnecessarily before turning around and realizing that the caves entrance was in fact at the cave (face palm)… In Grady’s words, “So you think that this vague muddy trail is more likely access to the caves than this gaping cave in front of us?”
My bad… We found the caves though and they didn’t disappoint. We were amazed by how many glow worms were on the cave walls and ceilings. The bioluminescence was stunning. We had to hunch over through narrow caverns to reach some of the best caves and never would’ve done it if there weren’t other people down there. Our Chacos and headlamps were key!
We detoured to the beaches west of Auckland that evening before heading back into town on Wednesday. On the way we replaced fuses in the car for the stereo and cigarette van lighter - our car skills are deepening day by day. Grady scouted a photography opportunity at a remote beach so we headed that direction. Little did we know that it would involve 14km of 1.25 lane, 2-way traffic on hair pin turns - oh and on a rutted out, steep, and mostly washboarded dirt road. It was an experience and then the sunset was sponsored by clouds and we didn’t get the photo anyway. Oh well! We ate chips and salsa on the black sand beach and waited until we could do the return journey on the gnarly road with headlights. The headlights helped, but the biggest help was our two lead blocker cars - we felt like we flew back up the hill. We found our campsite in a farm field and while the excursion to this photographic beach probably wasn’t worth it, the drive was at least memorable.
The next morning we had yummy flat whites at a coffee shop on our way to buy the roof box and rack. Somehow both of them were being sold in a small town 30 minutes south of Auckland that resembled Parker, CO. The whole buying and install process went shockingly smoothly and after that and a full car service, we were good to go! The funniest part of the car service was that we saw the couple there that owned the first van we looked at. They were getting some work done on the van so it’s good we passed on that one! We couldn’t believe when we saw the two vans lifted up next to each other.
After a few calls to home and running errands to kill time during the service appointment, we were on the road to the Coromandel and very ready to post up at a beach and relax.
We had fairly high hopes for the Coromandel, but it exceeded our expectations. The water color was Caribbean blue and coastal cliffs made the drives so scenic. Freedom camping was a bit harder to come by, but in hindsight that shouldn’t have been a big surprise given this is their busiest tourism week of the year. We lucked out with all of our camping spots though being next to the beach other than one next to a river. For a few early observations on New Zealand, the people are friendly and generous, there is a tremendous amount of gluten free food, and most things feel similar but are slightly different. Some of our favorite terms are trundlers for grocery carts, give way for yield, takeaway for takeout, Bach for vacation house, sweet as, and the constant “eh no worries”.
On our first night in the Coromandel we were gifted Carbonara from one of our van neighbors and enjoyed a peaceful evening on the water. We took a morning swim & made coffee just up the road. The trees along this stretch of the drive were so established and huge - it was beautiful. We drove across the peninsula to the east side just taking it slow and enjoying the scenic pull offs along the way. The next day started with an early morning hike in a town where there was coincidentally a farmers market. We bought local boysenberry jam and a lot of strawberries before making coffee at hot water beach. This beach has a stretch of sand where if you dig a hole it will fill with hot water. Turns out, that’s a small stretch of the beach and it was crowded so we ventured further down to where it was a normal hot sand / cold water beach with hardly anyone around. We chilled at the beach for a while before heading down to Waihi Beach where we freedom camped. Our campsite was walkable to a fish n chips takeaway restaurant so we had that overlooking the beach - it was lovely. Our final day in the Coromandel started with a sunrise hike that led us to kayaking to the Donut Island, to a waterfall and back to Waihi Beach. We were super impressed with kayaking to donut island - it was totally worth renting the kayaks! After securing our campsite we got a triple scoop of ice cream and spent the afternoon reading on the beach and I finished up writing this blog post from there.
Our van is finally feeling “road ready” so we’re heading to Raglan tomorrow, getting out of the more populated areas, and the bigger adventures begin! More to come soon, but in the meantime - meet, Ms. Stevens - our NZ adventure van. See the before & after pics of her renovation below. More to come soon!
Before…
