Adventures in the outdoors on
New Zealand's North Island

We have heard for years that many consider New Zealand to be a campers paradise. From what we have seen so fare this looks to be true and we have yet to experience the true Mecca of camping - the South Island !

Starting out in Auckland with our wonderfully compact and completely self-contained camper, we  immediately began searching for the proverbial D.O.C. (Department of Conservation) sites. This was  not easy, because the tourism industry here is more focused on directing tourists to a revenue generating system of commercial campgrounds and caravan sites -leaving the converted government created sites for the citizens , themselves world class campers.. Indeed, some information centers tried to convince us that our idea wasn't a wise one. We prevailed and found these spectacular ocean side and mountain side sites that are legend in the annals of world campers.

The weather here is much more to our likening than that of tropical northern Australian. Here the daytime highs are in the upper 70's and down sometimes into the 50's at night.

The campsites are sometimes brimming full and sometimes virtually empty
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