Navigating the North Island of New Zealand

At a certain age, the truth becomes impossible to ignore: time is limited, so do what you can while you can. For my husband, Adam, and me, that has meant prioritizing active travel, and New Zealand in particular. Plus, we may feel compelled to move there.

Realistically, this was our one shot, so we devoted nearly a month to experience both of the main islands. After slogging through the planning of a North Island itinerary, we decided to spend most of our South Island time on a Backroads group trip: we thought it might be nice to hand off the logistics and driving, and we knew we’d be ready to talk to other people.

Before I go any further, it bears mentioning that I don’t accept comps or let anyone know I’ll be writing about a place beforehand, because I want to be honest. If you think New Zealand is perfect in every way, you should probably stop reading.

The country is far away from just about everywhere, but most of that distance is north-south, and the time difference isn’t brutal: New Zealand is 19 to 21 hours ahead of us, depending on whether daylight saving has occurred here, there, or both places, but that’s essentially only a three-to-five-hour difference with a confusing date change. (When we were there, I thought of it as being four hours earlier, but tomorrow.) The flight from LAX takes around 13 hours; because it’s overnight and the time difference is relatively small, you don’t arrive as fried as you do when traveling to Europe. 

We flew to Auckland, then drove south to Rotorua by way of the west coast town of Raglan, continued on to Taupo, and finished outside Napier on the east coast. We used Backroads’s North Island itinerary for a general sense of where to go, so we shouldn’t have been surprised that we kept running into one of the company’s tours.

The countryside was glorious everywhere we went—less dramatic than on the South Island, but stunning just the same. It reminded us of California, particularly Gold Country, but with far fewer people. New Zealand is often described as having more sheep than humans; we thought cows were even more prevalent.

As with anywhere remote, the country has a distinct sense of place. Official signs are in English and Maori, although I don’t think we heard the latter spoken beyond the “kia ora” greeting. (And it helps to know that “Wh” is pronounced like an f, so a place name like Whitianga sounds more like Fitianga.) The Kiwi accent is charming, as you likely already know, and there are words and phrases that take some getting used to. A “dairy” is a corner store; “cabinet food” is prepared food; the “cellar door” is where wineries sell their wines. And New Zealand has its own currency, of course, but we only had to use cash once.

Restaurants almost always use paper napkins and put the utensils to the right of the plate, and you pay your bill at the bar or host’s stand. Order a cappuccino, and you’ll be asked whether you’d like cinnamon or chocolate.

Hotel minibars have milk for your in-room coffee, which is as likely to be a French press as a machine using plastic cups. No one seems to feel the need for window screens (and they would come in handy). The swans are predominantly black. Construction crews are mad for orange traffic cones, deploying five where one would do. And drivers do not stop for pedestrians.

The most powerful culture shock came at the Napier airport. Flights with fewer than 90 seats, such as ours to Christchurch, require no security whatsoever—no ID check, no limit on liquids, no metal detectors. It really was like going back in time.

I was joking about having to move to New Zealand, but only because the country is making it hard for foreigners to emigrate. Nonetheless, we played the could-I-live-here game in Auckland, and the answer was yes. Not because it’s a great city in the New York/London/Tokyo sense: the central business district, in fact, is the weakest part, despite some nice buildings, old and new.

And of course there are always quirky details to admire.

The neighborhoods are where it’s at. Instead of visiting attractions, of which there are probably some, we walked around Ponsonby, Herne Bay, Grey Lynn, and Parnell. People in the rest of New Zealand like to talk about how crowded Auckland is—a third of the country’s residents live there—but we found it astoundingly quiet.

The primary architectural style is Victorian, painted white, with a corrugated metal roof. I tried looking into the reason for the metal, besides value and durability, but I couldn’t find anything.

There’s also a fair bit of contemporary architecture, including a lot of modular buildings. The style in the first photo is extremely popular throughout New Zealand. (Any architects care to explain what it’s called?) The second photo is where I’d like to live.

In residential areas, we kept coming upon little paths that led to hidden parks—and in one case, to a boardwalk through mangroves. (You’re never far from the water in Auckland.) Encountering another human was rare, to say the least, and cicadas were trilling like crazy.

And we ate well! While New Zealand food tends to be heavy and uninspired, Auckland has terrific restaurants, such as Lilian, where we had excellent pickled mussels on puffy bread; Alma; Grand Harbour for dim sum; and my favorite, Tokki. It’s modern Korean and a 20-minute drive from the city center, but the $48 tasting menu is an insane value. The fried eggplant, pictured below, was unlike anything I’ve ever had.

We stayed at the Hotel Britomart downtown, which was great. The rooms are small but quiet, and it’s worth paying a bit more to get a corner room. And you can even try placing a bid to upgrade to one of the five much larger suites.

Auckland’s upmarket weekend getaway, Waiheke Island, is a 45-minute ferry ride from the city.  Many visitors take a hop-on, hop-off bus to explore the island, and its wineries in particular, but we rented e-bikes, which was ideal—the farther you go off the main roads, the better the island gets. The change of pace was welcome, and the experience was good practice for driving on the left side of the street.

The day was so perfect, weather and otherwise, that we even stopped for a mini tasting at Mudbrick Vineyard.

And just as in Auckland, we were delighted by secret paths. While eating lunch from a pizza truck at Oneroa Beach, we noticed a trail heading up the bluff. It leads to an exquisite little cove.

From Auckland, we drove to the beach town of Raglan, which reminded me a bit of Carpinteria, but more tourism-oriented. Perhaps because it was a gorgeous day on the first weekend of the fall, it was packed.

And we continued on to the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. The tour is marvelously short, and while I’ve long felt that I don’t need to ever spend more time in a cave, I was charmed when our guide sang in order to show off the acoustics. As for the glowworms—not actually worms, but the larvae of fungus gnats—they are magical in aggregate.

I guess it had been a while since we relied on guidebooks—Lonely Planet and Moon—to plan a trip, because we seemed to have forgotten that they have to cover everywhere and appeal to everyone, and just because they say something is worthwhile doesn’t mean that it’s right for us. To wit, the town of Rotorua. It’s not physically attractive and it smells like sulfur, due to the geothermal activity in the area, both of which we might have been able to get over had there not been such an emphasis on mass tourism. Next time we’re planning a trip, and we can’t find one decent restaurant or hotel, we’re going to take it as a sign.

So we treated our time there as a kind of weekend off from travel. Our VRBO rental was new, handsome, and right on a lake, and the extra space was welcome after the Hotel Britomart. We cooked a simple meal and ordered in twice, and there was a sweet café a short drive away. So much of travel is about finding things to do, but sometimes you have to just let yourself be in a beautiful place.

We didn’t do absolutely nothing. There was blogging, of course, and we took a couple of hikes, including one where you could see the steam coming out of the hillside.

Our house was just down the street from a boat launch, so we rented kayaks and had a blast paddling on Lake Rotioti. We had figured we’d just admire the shoreline, until the kayak guy told us about Lake Rotioti Hot Pools, where we stopped to stretch our legs and have a Coke. There’s something irresistible about a spot that’s only accessible from the water.

Taupo is better than Rotorua, but not by much. If you go to New Zealand, you’ll get asked a lot whether you’ll be bungee-jumping. I’m no fan of heights, and I’m old enough to worry that I’d hurt something (extra unappealing in the middle of a trip with lots of hiking), so we opted for the swing instead. You’re in a seated position, and drop rather than dive, then arc out over the water. It was fun! And I love that the photos and video are included in the price.

I also loved the restroom signs.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to spend much time in Taupo, for we were staying at Kinloch Manor, 20 minutes outside of town, where dinner is included. The architecture and setting are sublime, and manager Giacomo Fabozzi made us feel very welcome. My only criticism is that, for the rather high room rate, breakfast (and especially the coffee) should be better. The second morning, we went to the coffee cart by the lake instead.

And because we were staying in a fancy suite—the Backroads group we kept overlapping with had snapped up all the smaller ones—we felt OK with spending more time than usual there.

The hotel is known for its golf course, which held no interest. Instead, we hiked alongside a river to a waterfall…

…and borrowed the hotel’s e-bikes to noodle around the town of Kinloch. One trail led to the beach, which was so appealing we went back later for a swim.

By the time we arrived in Napier, we had realized that the towns are not the best part of New Zealand. It’s known for its art deco architecture, and some of the buildings are lovely, but the storefronts on the main strip have been covered in schlock; South Beach it ain’t. To cap it off, we had a truly awful lunch. Throughout the non-Auckland parts of the country, there’s a sameness to the menus—it felt mandatory for every menu to have a fried chicken sandwich, an open-faced steak sandwich, and pork belly in some fashion. (Vegetables are minimal.) On the plus side, the coffee is great.

I had to admire this hostel’s branding, even if the reference must elude the target demographic.

We stayed outside the nearby town of Havelock North, where Black Barn Vineyards has 17 rental houses of various sizes. While the decor was dated, the place was fully kitted out, including eggs, bread, butter, yogurt, jam, and coffee for breakfast. I’m not sure why I bothered looking through the guest book, but I was glad I did.

This is wine country, and there were grapes, but the many apple orchards, with rows of espaliered trees, made more of an impression. We tried the country’s fresh fruit ice cream (soft-serve made with real fruit); bought unusual varieties of figs from The Figgery; and had flat whites at the adorable shipping-container café down the street from our house.

And we finally did a real hike: the Giant Circuit trail in Te Mata Trust Park. As the sun rose, it lit up the lowland fog to spectacular effect. Plus: redwoods.

After Havelock North, we left for the South Island, which warrants a separate post. Before returning home via Auckland, however, we made one last stop on the North Island, spending a couple of nights on the Coromandel Peninsula east of the city. The two-and-a-half-hour drive each way is pretty hairy, and the town of Whitianga didn’t hold much appeal. At the time, I wished we had just returned to Auckland to eat good food.

Instead, I made Adam go to The Lost Spring, a kitschy hot-pool complex—Disneyland meets the Playboy Mansion grotto—that all the other patrons took weirdly seriously. A far more satisfying outing was kayaking to Cathedral Cove, where a cave tunnel links two idyllic beaches.

The water is clear and turquoise—so beautiful that, after swimming for a while, I headed back to shore to get my phone for a photo. While shaking the water off my hands, I inadvertently flung my platinum wedding ring somewhere into the surf. Don’t say I never gave you anything, New Zealand.

P.S. Now that I’ve lost two wedding bands, I’ve been demoted to stainless steel.

·············

Previous travel coverage:
••• Don’t Be So Quick to Write Off Phoenix
••• The Most Magical City in the World
••• One and Done in Sedona
••• A Proper Visit to Santa Monica
••• A Quickie in San Francisco
↓↓↓ Dipping a Toe Into Southern Corsica
••• The Exquisite Luxury of Taking Paris for Granted
••• Santa Rosa Island in One Day
••• Soaking Up History at Castle Hot Springs
••• Driving Through the Heart of Hokkaido
••• Tokyo Is a World Unto Itself
••• Paso Robles, Pinnacles National Park, and Beyond
••• A Review of the Inn at Mattei’s Tavern
••• Another Quickie in L.A.
••• Sitting Pretty at the One & Only Mandarina
••• The Mysteries of Istanbul
••• Palm Springs: Midweek at the Oasis
••• Exploring the Sea Caves of Santa Cruz Island
••• A Summer Swing Through the Northeast
••• Why Is Everyone Going to Portugal?
••• Patagonia Made Easy
••• A Quickie in L.A.
••• From Penthouse to Pavement in Mexico City
••• Do Greek Islands Live Up to the Fantasy?
••• Splendid Isolation at Utah’s Lodge at Blue Sky
••• Three Reasons to Visit Paso Robles Now
••• The Rebirth of the Cuyama Buckhorn

················

Sign up for the Siteline email newsletter and you’ll never miss a post.