New Zealand

How long do you need

What your time actually buys

Your leave is fixed, so the useful question is not how long New Zealand takes. It is what the fortnight you already have will buy.

The short version: under a fortnight is one island. Two weeks is the shortest trip that covers both, and it moves. Three weeks is the same trip without the alarm clock. The median international stay is ten days — which is one island, done properly, and there is no shame in it.

Whatever the length, cap the driving day at 350 kilometres. Three sources arrive at that figure independently, and the regret in every post-trip thread we read is the same one: too many nights in too many beds.

We publish five worked routes — both islands in a fortnight, the South Island, the North Island, three weeks across both, and the twenty-one-day North Island road trip we actually drove.

Every one of them is scored on its own page against the same five tests we use to audit everybody else’s, and every one names something it fails — the fortnight cannot reach the glaciers, and three weeks still cannot reach Northland. So start at the tests rather than at a route. They take about a minute, and they decide which of the five you want.

If you are still choosing a length. Five bands — a week, ten days, a fortnight, three weeks, a month — each one saying plainly what it buys and, more usefully, what it makes you leave out.
How many days do you need? →

If you have already drafted something. We read thirty-six published fortnight itineraries day by day, found what was wrong with most of them, and turned it into five tests you can run against your own plan in about a minute — and the same page now sets all five of our worked routes side by side, with what each one gives up Test your itinerary →

Before you book

Worth knowing

Fly in at one end and out at the other. The arrivals panel at the top of this page is the reason. One caution: Queenstown’s international flights go to Australia and nowhere else, so from Europe or North America the open jaw that works is Auckland in and Christchurch out, or the reverse. From Australia, Queenstown is a front door. Doing both countries in one trip is a standard product — Trafalgar, Tauck, Gate 1 and EF Go Ahead all sell it under its own name.

It is not small. Under a fortnight means one island, and that is the correction locals issue more often than any other.

The map will not tell you the drive time. The gap is not a fixed percentage, so do not try to multiply it: it runs from a tenth on the straight into Wellington to nearly double over the Haast Pass.

Your hire car may not cross on the ferry. Some companies will not allow it. You hand the car back at Wellington, cross as a foot passenger, and pick up another at Picton.

Queenstown is not only scenery. Its own tourism board publishes a guide for hen and stag parties, and the centre carries more than 150 bars and restaurants. Our own page warns it “can feel relentlessly aimed at people who want to throw themselves off things”. A compatibility question, not a criticism.

Those last three, the day you lose crossing the Pacific, and the small-town kitchens that regulars say stop serving at six or seven, are all set out with the evidence on one page: car, ferry and real drive times. It is the densest page we have written about New Zealand and the one to read before you book anything.

Know before you go

The practical ground

Entry. Most visitors need an NZeTA before they board. It costs NZ$17 through the official mobile app or NZ$23 on the website, lasts two years, and the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy of NZ$100 is paid at the same time — about NZ$117 all in, or NZ$123 if you use the website. Allow seventy-two hours. Australian citizens need neither. Australian permanent residents need the NZeTA but not the levy.

Money. The government’s International Visitor Survey puts median spending at NZ$293 a day, on a median stay of ten days, and that figure excludes what you paid for the flight.

Getting about. Hire a car. There is no public transport network worth planning around outside the cities. Whether a campervan beats a car and a bed is worked through, with the fuel figures, on the getting-around page.

Weather. Temperate, maritime and changeable, and the mountains make their own conditions. It sits further from the equator than most visitors assume — Invercargill is at the latitude of Bordeaux, in the wrong hemisphere.

Language. English throughout. Te reo Māori is an official language and you will meet it constantly in place names — learning to say them is the easiest courtesy there is.