Kiwi Adventure: The Plan

One thing is for sure, planning an adventure this size can be a real struggle. Mainly because we are travelling with the two girls, and we have to put extra care and attention to every detail. Are we staying in a child-safe place? Will the kids have enough to do so they don’t bore themselves? Are we doing much travelling for a single day? How are they going to handle an 18 hour time-zone change?

The long travel to New Zealand

The first step was deciding the way we were going to handle the actual flight to New Zealand. There are three ways to arrive to New Zealand if you are travelling from Mexico: via London, via Buenos Aires and via the US west coast. For practical and budget reasons we decided for the latter, the US west coast. This will mean a 5 hour flight from Mexico City to San Francisco, and then a 12 hour flight from San Francisco to Auckland, overall a 17 hour flight + airport time.

This will be too much to handle for the little ones, that’s how we decided to put a couple of days between the MEX-SFO flight and the SFO-AKL flight, and that’s how the San Francisco destination came to be.

The Accommodations

Originally the plan was set to make it a three month travel trip, we would rent some flat in Wellington and then do our explorations from there.

But…

The rents in New Zealand are very affordable, the big problem is that there are not a lot of offers for apartment that are fully furnished (beds, kitchenware, laundry, etc), and the few options  there are, they are rented for what is called holiday homes, which are places you rent for short-stays (more than 1 week, less than 6 months).

That was our first issue, the second issue is that we didn’t take into consideration the actual distances in New Zealand. In our ignorance we saw a little island in the south pacific and figured that every city in the island must be within 2-3 hours drives (yeah! that ignorant). The truth is that there are real distances, for example Auckland is a good 8 hour drive from Wellington. This meant that our plan to stay in Wellington all the time and just go and visit the whole island became impossible.

That’s how we decided to shorten the travel to two months, that will give us an extra month budget, and to rent holiday homes in different locations of the island. Also we decided to stick to the North Island, so in this trip we won’t be visiting the South Island, we are doing this so we can use the money it would have taken us to go from one island to another to rent a car for a month (We know, travelling from one island to another is expensive).

All the accommodations we found are amazing, they include all the services (water, gas, electricity), the are fully furnished, most of them include SKY TV and broadband connection, so no extra money has to be spent on those items.

An Insider

The Perl (the language I program in) community is an amazing community. When we first decided to make the trip I immediately contacted the Wellington Perl Mongers to let them know we were about to go across the ocean and visit their country. The response was amazing, and between them Andrew came to be. Andrew is a Perl programmer which he actually doesn’t use much, but he is very involved in technology, he is married and has kids of his own. He became a friend to me and through all the planning process he would give me tips and advice which became an amazing resource of our planning stages. We will meet him when we are there, and you’ll meet him when we do.

The Final Plan

After weeks of searching and calling, making spreadsheets to lay out our budget and bugging Andrew for hours at a time, we booked our final plan which is as follows:

• San Francisco – Nov 12 to Nov 14
• Auckland – Nov 15 to Nov 23
• Wellington – Nov 23 to Dec 23
• Napier – Dec 23 to Dec 30
• Rotorua – Dec 30 to Jan 13
• Whangarei – Jan 13 to Jan 19