New Zealand in 3000km, 2 weeks..and 1 Mouse.

After an exodus of colleagues I’d been dying to see for myself what New Zealand was really like. A friend’s wedding in Sydney was the perfect excuse to tag on a couple of weeks campervanning it round NZ with my wife Emily.

We’d been to Sydney before so steered clear of the usual tourist spots, but the harbour bridge and opera house never fail to impress. This time we decided to try out the train connection to the CBD from the airport rather than getting a cab. The service was perfectly timed, cheap and very user friendly. Double decker trains were an interesting novelty and made me wonder what the pro’s and con’s are of this? Less carriage length per passenger obviously but surely the trains less aerodynamic? I’d never seen this before anywhere else.



My first ever Jewish wedding came and went (if you’ve never been to one they’re an experience in themselves!), and we swiftly flew on to Auckland, beginning our road trip through Rotorua, Lake Taupo and Wellington in the North Island, then the interislander ferry to Picton and then on to Kaikora, Franz Josef, Queenstown, Milford Sound, Dunedin and finally Christchurch. Phew! Campervans are the best way to see this place. A theory confirmed by the number you see on the road, and the number of excellent camp sites on offer. Free camping by the side of the road is always an option to keep costs down, although after a mouse spending the night keeping us awake running round our van we stuck to the pay sites!

Overall New Zealand’s countryside struck me as being similar to Wales, but at an extreme scale. The vastness of the landscape was sometimes difficult to comprehend. A waterfall that seemed close was infact 9km away. I don’t know what I was expecting of the towns and cities, but they surprised me in how American they were in style. Cities were set on the Jefferson grid layout and the small town’s main streets had more than a striking resemblance to something out of a western cowboy movie. The roads connecting them were 99% single carriageway, with dualled sections only sited near the largest of cities of Auckland and Christchurch. Generally the road surfacing quality was high, but some of the sight lines over hogs must have been less than DMRB desirable, even at the 100kph speed limit and from my camper’s elevated driving position.

New Zealand’s ‘style’ was undoubtedly relaxed. The minimal H&S training you needed to jump out of plane at 12,000ft or climb through crevices of a glacier struck me as something you would have to go a decade or two back in the UK to be allowed. Other things from infrastructure through to marketing also reminded me of where the UK was years ago. The massive opportunities for Engineers to emigrate and work in NZ shows that the country is moving on, and I bet there’s plenty of interesting work to be done out there. It’ll be interesting to see how the place develops over the next decade.







Then it was back to good old Wales just in time to go to the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation Annual Dinner with my Halcrow lot. Despite the jet lag it was a great evening.