Segwun at Sea: Facts and Stats

March 31, 2014

As we prepare to move on, here is a quick summing up of our 9½ weeks in New Zealand.

The country has 4.5 million inhabitants across an area of 269K square kilometers (bigger than the UK) but 63% of them live on the North Island. No great surprise there – the South Island’s terrain is a lot more rugged and the climate is less temperate than the North Island.

During our stay we did a fair amount of walking / tramping. Counting only the walks along trails and not the normal walking one does while shopping or visiting museums, etc. we calculate we have walked more than 100 hours. Just to put that into perspective it would mean walking 12 hours a day for 8 ½ days if done consecutively. And if we calculate an average walking pace of 4 km per hour we have gone more than 400 kilometers by foot.

We did a fair bit more driving however. We covered the North and South Islands by doing a huge figure eight and drove more than 11,000 kilometers which is quite amazing when you consider the distance from the tip of the North Island to the tip of the South Island is a distance of just over 1,500 kilometers. But as I mentioned in one of my blogs, you are hard pressed to find a straight piece of road on the South Island and the North Island has only slightly more, so with all the twists and turns and ups and downs the kilometers do start to add up. Fuel is not so cheap here with the average price for unleaded at $2.10 NZ. We managed to spend almost $3,000 NZ on fuel during our 71-day road trip. I guess the hilly landscape and our thirsty Lucky van both contributed to fairly bad fuel economy. C’est la vie!

But having said that, staying in our Lucky van saved us quite a bit on accommodations. We spent just under $15.00 per night including the two nights in a hotel. And who knows how much we saved by cooking many of our own meals. It is quite amazing what great meals you can prepare on a two-burner stove.

Overall, New Zealand receives about 2.4 million visitors per year. We noticed the majority of travellers using the camper van sites were either British or German – not including the Kiwis. So we were intrigued to find out if this was representative of the total number of visitors to New Zealand. It turns out not to be the case at all because of the 2.4 million arriving to New Zealand each year, only 3% are from Germany and 8% from the UK. The majority of the visitors are from Asia and from our observation they apparently are not as much into the camping lifestyle as the Europeans.

It has been a wonderful visit and we have met some truly lovely people here. It has been a mix of meeting old colleagues, making new friends and catching up with the Puddle Jumpers who are now busy preparing for the next sailing season. But it’s time to say farewell and hope we’ll see these folks again, perhaps in the Northern Hemisphere.