Day 229 Saturday, March 19th. New Zealand recap.

15 days and 3,000km in a camper van, all in the south island. We had a great time and would recommend a visit. An awful lot of people do the campervan routine, the roads are full of them and the campsites are set up to host them with power, water, hot showers, laundry, large kitchen if you want it (the campers have a cooking range and most nights we cooked in our camper) and usually, a lounge area with TV etc. if you want some company. About NZ$40-50/night. (US70c to one NZ$). The campervans range from about NZ$100-200/day.
About 1m of NZ’s 4m population live in the south island and the rest are in the north island. We chose, for this trip anyway, to only do the south island and we’re happy with that decision. We have met a lot of Kiwis travelling here in the south island (most of them visiting from the north of course) and all of the input is that the south island has about 75% of the sights. Two weeks was about right to see the south island for the first time, it’s a beautiful place if you like the outdoors and that’s where all the Kiwis are: biking (lots of tourists on biking holidays), kayaking, fishing, hiking (“tramping”) etc.
We were here March 5th to 20th and the weather stopped us hiking a couple of times but, for the most part, we enjoyed sun with just a little nip in the air and some Fall colours. I doubt crowds would be a problem even in peak summer in January and February-this is a sparsely populated island.
We are discussing a return trip of between 6-8 weeks and then we would do a couple of weeks in the north island (there are definitely some things to see up there) but then spend most of the time in the south island and do some more serious hiking and fly fishing and bring the right gear with us. We will see, we liked New Zealand a lot.