Auckland

Our possessions for the next year

In our usual fashion, we arrived to O’Hare about five hours early for our flight, an hour and a half before the Air New Zealand check-in even opened. Finally, at 8:40pm on Sunday, October 13, we departed on our 16 hour journey. Luckily, we had found a reasonably priced direct flight or that length could have easily been doubled. The flight was smooth and we sat next to a nice New Zealander who was about our age and gave us tons of helpful recommendations and tips. With the massive time difference, we arrived in Auckland on Tuesday, October 15 at 6:30am. Customs was simple; the only notable and unique aspect being Biosecurity New Zealand, the department responsible for “stopping pests and diseases at the border, before they get to New Zealand, and eradicating or managing the impact of those already here”. This meant that we had to get our hiking boots inspected by the customs officer and had to hand over our tent to be inspected behind closed doors. Fortunately, both items passed; we just had to refold our tent in the middle of the Auckland airport!

We arrived to the city center, CBD, in the pouring rain and walked the short distance from the airport shuttle stop to our hostel. The Attic Backpackers was our home for the next four nights; it was a clean and relatively quiet hostel, and those that worked there were extremely helpful to all of the guests, an important quality when you have so many travelers stopping there as their first point in a new country.

Our time in Auckland was spent figuring out the logistics of our Work Holiday Visas and completing monotonous tasks that would make our lives in New Zealand easier. For example, we got local phone plans, opened a NZ bank account, and bought a car. The process for opening a bank account used to be fairly straightforward; however, a new policy that took effect on October 1 of this year has made it a lot more challenging for Work Holiday Visa holders to open accounts. It sounds as though the main bank that catered towards travelers, ANZ, was having a hard time dealing with the large influx of people needing to open accounts, so they adjusted their process to be more group-oriented, rather than an individual dealing one-on-one with a banker. We plan to do an in-depth post about the logistics to help other travelers, so we won’t bore you with that here! Long story short - by circumventing the new process, we got our account opened, which allowed us to get moving on buying our car!

That was a whole challenge in itself…we first had to decide what type of car we were looking for. We were considering one of the following:

• A Subaru hatchback - would allow us to sleep in it if necessary and be dependable driving through the mountains, but would ultimately mean we’d camp in our tent every night.
• An unconverted minivan - we’d remove the seats and sleep in the back on our sleeping pads as needed.
• A converted, self-contained minivan - would have a platform bed (allowing you to store all of your stuff underneath), a functional pump sink, and a portable toilet. Even though no one ever actually uses the toilet, simply having that and the ‘running water’ allows the van to be certified as self-contained.
• A full-on camper van - unfortunately, this wasn’t really in the running as they’re much pricier and would have broken our budget!

Having a self-contained minivan or campervan would allow us to ‘freedom camp’, sleep in our van at Department of Conservation approved sites, which range from rugby field parking lots to beautiful beach front marina property, most of which are free. So although the upfront cost would be greater, we would save on accommodations throughout our travels.

After spending a few nights in Auckland, we were itching to get on the road, so after a few deals fell through on Facebook Marketplace, we decided to go to the Auckland City Car Fair. It was an overwhelming scene - dozens of the most aggressive used car salesmen approaching you, spurting out stats on the van you had merely glanced at, advertising different deals that they were immediately ready to give you, and one guy even offering us jobs. We wandered around there for a while, doing our best to politely avoid getting trapped in a conversation with a dealer before seeing the full selection. Curse our midwestern niceness! We were feeling dejected and completely overwhelmed with all of the options, but really wanted to buy a car that day, so we could move on.

Finally, we came across a small self-contained minivan whose price tag was a lot cheaper than any other self-contained vehicles we had come across. Could this be it?! We ended up taking it for a test drive and getting it checked out by a mechanic, and after passing both tests, we decided to bite the bullet and make it ours! The seller was a nice Iranian man, Amin, and although reticent at first, we got to know him extremely well. We spent a marathon afternoon with him - waiting an hour for the mechanic, driving to the bank, running a personal errand for him, driving out to an Auckland suburb where he thought the NZ version of the DMV would be less busy, but was actually closed, going to a different suburb, finally successfully switching over the title and registration, and ending the afternoon by filling up the gas tank. All of this literally took four hours!

After finally parting ways with our new friend Amin, and left alone with our new van, we were beyond exhausted. We ended up going to a nearby mall and eating dinner at McDonald’s, for some reason both feeling woeful. We were glad to be done with the van purchase, but at the same time nervous we had been taken advantage of and the van would break down just outside of Auckland. Regardless, we were now the (proud?) owners of a white 2001 Toyota Ipsum 240i that had 256,000km/159,000mi on it. We paid $4,350NZD (a little less than $3,000USD) which we felt was a good deal considering we didn’t see a single other self-contained van for less than $5,000NZD, assuming it holds up…

We didn’t waste any more time and from McDonald’s, we set off for Northland, the large northernmost peninsula of New Zealand. Goodbye, Auckland and city prices!

For more pictures, check out our Instagram, from_oakland_to_auckland, also linked below!