Your two weeks in New Zealand is eleven and a half days.
A free 29-page planning document, written from New Zealand. Not where to go — you already know that. The hard constraints your itinerary has to survive.
The four problems
1.
You have fewer days than you think
The flight west crosses the date line and deletes a whole calendar day. Jet lag takes most of the next one. Fourteen days away is about four bases, not seven.
2.
Your drive times are wrong
Google gives driving time with no stops. On winding roads it runs about 17% under New Zealand's own official figures. Eight of the 36 main routes will not fit in a sensible driving day.
3.
Daylight changes everything
Queenstown gets 15h35 of daylight in December and 8h47 in June. The Queenstown–Milford day trip needs 142% of a June day. It cannot be done.
4.
Some things cannot be booked late
Great Walks open on one fixed date each year. Miss it and you wait twelve months. Campervans go 6–12 months out for summer.
What's inside
- Every main route, with the official time and the time to actually plan for
- The daylight table for five cities, month by month.
- A booking calendar — what to book, and how many months ahead.
- What you need before you fly: NZeTA, the visitor levy, the declaration
- What things really cost, in US dollars.
- The arithmetic behind every number, so you can check it rather than trust it.
Why you can trust the numbers
Written from New Zealand. Every figure comes from NZTA, the Department of Conservation, NIWA, Tourism New Zealand or Immigration New Zealand — and is checked against the others. Nothing is recycled from other blogs. The document is dated and versioned, because prices and booking dates change.
A couple spends US$12,000–18,000 on this trip. Across 11.5 usable days, one wasted day costs US$1,000–1,500.
