Hitting the Road: Auckland to Rotorua

After a couple of weeks of searching, we finally found and fell in love with a Nissan HOMY called Etta. We bought it from a nice American couple who’d already had a year of adventures travelling New Zealand. Finding a van was harder than we anticipated, but our perseverance paid off (fingers crossed the old girl keeps going).

Our Homy!

Our first night in the van was not quite as romantic as we had imagined it to be: after having the windows tinted, we couldn’t open them for 48hrs! So we spent the first night in a very stuffy, damp van with only a pot noodle for dinner, but our adventure had properly begun.

We visited Blue Springs early on our travels and couldn’t believe the colour of the river. As we arrived in the evening, there weren’t many tourists around so it was peaceful and Nick even managed to catch a few nice rainbow trout.  

Taking our time to explore the lesser known parts of the North Island has been great. We spent a few nights exploring the Waikato and King Country regions, with their rolling green Hobbiton hills and rivers full of trout – we had a brilliant few nights here. 

4lb of King Country gold

A highlight was a night walk through a deserted gorge deep in the bush in search of glow worms. We thought we might be lucky and see a couple but we were so surprised to see thousands of these green, shiny maggots illuminating the gorge walls and cave systems like fairy lights. It was like having our own private tour (even better that we didn’t pay a cent)!

On our way to Rotorua we stopped off at Pirongia Forest Park and had a very sweaty tramp up to Ruapane Lookout (723 m). We enjoyed fantastic views of the surrounding area as it is the only real point of elevation for miles around. A quick dip in the river at the end of the trail meant we were ‘refreshed’ and ready to hit the road again.

Ruapane Lookout

On to Rotorua…a pretty cool place (if not a little smelly). Like nothing we had ever seen before (bubbling mud pools, hot springs and thermal vents). There were lots of tourist attractions but they were quite out of our price range so we looked into what we could experience for free. We spent an afternoon wandering round Kuirau Park: an urban park with lots of thermal activity. We drove out to some of the lakes surrounding Rotorua and Nick had a superb afternoon sightfishing to big rainbows in one of the feeder rivers of Lake Rotorua itself. The last thing we did in Rotorua was the luge…basically real life Mario Kart racing, this was awesome fun and like everyone said we needed the five ride ticket!

Thermal pools at Kuirau Park

4lb Rotoruan Rainbow

Hey Mario! Riding the gondola on race day.