New Zealand Travel Expenses

New Zealand was awesome. I’m so glad we decided to go. We almost didn’t because we knew it would cost a fortune. The only reason we ended up there was because we used award travel to get across the Pacific from South America to Australia and it was the same number of points to fly to either Australia or New Zealand. Had we been paying for it outright New Zealand would have been the more expensive ticket, so we decided to get more bang for our buck on the award travel and go for it. 

Not every day of camping was spent surrounded by spectacular scenery. We had our fair share of cloudy and rainy days which were never fun to set the tent up in. 

Hiking along the Saint James Walkway. 

New Zealand gave me a whole new appreciation for the outdoors. We had already seen so much amazing scenery on our trip that I didn’t think it was possible to feel impressed any more by expanses of mountains and valleys and raging rivers. I felt like we had seen it all. New Zealand, however, proved that we could still be impressed and that we had certainly not seen it all. I think it was the colors of everything that surprised me the most. I kept taking pictures of trees along our hike because I didn’t know that trees could be in such a vibrant shade of green. Or that lakes could be so intensely blue and rivers so completely clear. Or that there could be endless fields of flowers as far as you can see. It seemed like every corner we turned was picture worthy.

One of the many random photos I took of plants along the way. Every tree and shrub seemed to have multiple layers of color to them.

These bushes with the bright yellow flowers were everywhere and were a striking contrast to the blue sky and mountains.

All the colors near the top of Queenstown Hill. Some of the reds are just dead trees, but still, it's rare to find so much variety in one place. Unless, of course, you're in New Zealand where everything looks like this.

Endless fields of these flowers lined the drive from Te Anau to Milford Sound.

It also helped that New Zealand makes the outdoors fun and accessible. There is an enormous network of trails and huts all over the country. Unlike in South America where we had to constantly use our phone’s GPS to not get lost, the trails in New Zealand are painstakingly marked along their entire length. The huts are shockingly nice in some places, equipped with cooking facilities, bunks, wood-burning stoves, and some will even have their own cooking fuel. While you have to pay for this ease of access in the form of a per-person-per-night fee even just for setting up a tent, it does make the whole hiking and camping experience a bit more comfortable.

Some of the lakes, like Lake Pukaki here, look so blue that something almost looks wrong with them. But you see their shorelines and you realize that the water is so clear that you can see every stone under the water. So this is what clean lakes are supposed to look like then? 

Due to the cost of visiting New Zealand we couldn’t afford to simply hang around and make things up as we went, so we spent a tremendous amount of time making our travel arrangements before we got there. In fact, most of our major expenses were paid for before we even landed. We ended up with a packed three-week trip that looked very similar to our past three-week vacations. It had been a long time since we ran around a country that fast, but it was necessary if we wanted to get the most out of our time there. At times it felt a bit exhausting but I’m glad we saw everything that we did. 

The boardwalk at Ship Creek Park.

Hiking down from Mueller Hut shortly after dawn.

Our three weeks in New Zealand started with a two-week road trip around the South Island so we could complete the 5-day Saint James Walkway and 2-day Mueller Hut hikes, as well as visit the west coast, Queenstown, and Milford Sound. We then returned the car and flew to the North Island for the 5-day Whanganui River Journey. It also took us four days to get there. It’s hard to say where exactly that time went, but we had an overnight flight and two overnight stopovers in Santiago and Sydney. We’re including this travel time as being all part of our New Zealand time, which in the end adds up to four weeks although we only really had 24 days on the ground in New Zealand. 

Transportation: No surprise that this is our largest expense. First, we had to get there. We bought a flight from Lima to Santiago, used award travel on a flight from Santiago to Christchurch, and paid for a domestic flight from Christchurch to Wellington. We also had a rental car that cost $335 for two-weeks, plus the $280 we spent on gas and parking. Gas wasn’t cheap at around $6/gallon and we put 2,328 km on the car. We also spent $124 on bus tickets to get us from Wellington to Taumarunui and then onward to Auckland.
Accommodations: We spent more nights in our tent than not. We had 15 nights of camping where we spent an average of $15 per night in camping fees, plus the additional cost of our tent and supplies which in the end came to $11 a day. Of the nine nights we spent in hostels or hotels we averaged $51 a night. Gone were our days of getting an entire apartment for $25. In New Zealand, dorm beds ran around $25 per person. There were only two nights of the whole trip when we had a private bathroom to ourselves.
Grocery: We spent a lot of time outdoors and we got all our food for camping and hiking from the grocery store.
Tourism: Only three expenses in this category: $260 for our canoe hire on the Whanganui River, $82 for our Milford Sound cruise, and $21 for our pub crawl in Queenstown.
Restaurants: We didn’t eat out all that often, but when we did our dinners averaged around $25 for the both of us. We put a lot of effort into finding cheap eats.
Drinks: Most of our money was spent in Queenstown on morning coffees and evening beers, but we would stop occasionally for a coffee or soda while driving around in the car.
Other: A SIM card, laundry, fuel for the camping stove, water shoes, and post cards make up this category.

On the road with our rental car. It was expensive, but worth the cost. 

I’m actually somewhat impressed that we only spent $123 per day in New Zealand. This is by far the most expensive country we’ve visited yet on our trip. Keeping busy with hiking and camping and getting our food from the grocery store helped keep our costs down. We would have spent a fortune had we been staying in hotels and eating out at restaurants the entire time. Our rental car was a significant expense, but it got us to many places we wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and the flexibility saved us time in the end. It felt like quite the luxury to us and we enjoyed having it.

Paddling along the Whanganui River.

In the end, New Zealand was absolutely worth the cost. It’s hard to describe, but the scenery is so dramatic, and the rivers, lakes, mountains, and valleys seem so pristine that it almost feels like you’re not supposed to be there. As if your presence alone is ruining what nature envisioned for that place. It’s a feeling of being in a huge unexplored wilderness and the only way to see it is to throw on a backpack and go for a hike. Although we saw so much on our whirlwind trip, I would still like to make it back one day to see even more. 

This was one of our last pictures of the sunshine before the rains set in on the Saint James Walkway.