The morning after our massive hike over the Tongiriro Crossing, we took it easy to let our bodies recover as we enjoyed a slow gentle morning sipping coffee in bed. There was a hot water spot on the beach right by our hotel that I discovered as I walked to a nearby coffee shop. I didn’t even realize it was there until about an hour before we had to check out of our hotel. It’s too bad we hadn’t discovered it earlier so we could have soaked in the hot water after our Tongariro Crossing hike to speed our recovery.

We drove back to Auckland to catch our afternoon flight to Christchurch on the south island. As an added bonus, Heather and I got an emergency row to ourselves on our short Air New Zealand flight. On our descent I checked to see which hotel I’d booked us into but couldn’t find a reservation in my email… then I realized that a month previous we had to reschedule the pickup of our “Maui” RV rental to the next day because the pick up deadline was 4PM, and we were landing just after 4PM. Fortunately I was able to hop on the Expedia app on my phone as soon as we touched down, and was able to book a room at a nice hotel near the airport before we pulled up at our gate.

We discovered that our hotel ended up being only about 100 meters away from the airport, which made taking the shuttle seem a little ridiculous. After we settled in we wandered over to a little strip mall next door and ate some incredible mango chicken and naan bread. It was an unassuming little Indian food place called, Little India Restaurant at the Spitfire Square.

The next morning I went to pickup a coffee at the nearby McDonald’s however the coffee machine was broken, so we had to settle for black tea for our morning caffeine fix. The Maui RV rental location was less than a kilometre away, so I walked over and pick up our camper van, which took about 40 minutes to do all the paperwork and get an orientation on all the van’s systems. When I arrived back to hotel, Heather was waiting with our luggage, so we loaded it up and hit the road!

We drove south along the coast, and used the Rankers Camping NZ app to find a beautiful little freedom camp spot on a bluff overlooking the ocean in Timaru, called the Patiti Point Reserve.

We enjoyed amazing view of the ocean while sitting at the table in the back of our RV at Patiti Point.

We did some exploring on our evening walk to the Timaru Botanic Gardens nearby. We met an elderly gentleman walking his dog, and enjoyed talking about him about his travels in Western Canada 50 years before. While standing outside an aviary in the park he also gave us some great NZ travel tips, including advice to stop in Oamaru the next day to see the blue penguin sanctuary there.

The morning before we headed to Oamaru further south down the coast, we went for a long walk on the beach towards the Timaru port facility, and saw several cute little fur seals on the breakwater.

On the very end of the bluff on the photo below you can see a bit of white; that is our camper van, and as I mentioned the buff gave is a priceless view of the ocean.

After our beach walk we hopped into our Maui RV and travelled south on the main east coast highway. Interestingly it was primarily a two lane highway with occasionally passing lanes. The lack places to pass cares was especially noticeable to us as the highway speed limit in NZ for RV’s is 90 kilometres per hour (or 56 miles per hour). So frequently we would either be behind a big train of RV’s cruising along at 90km/h or have several vehicles piled up behind us, passing us when possible. The good news about the lower RV speed limit is that we got excellent gas mileage from our diesel mercedes RV, and our total fuel bill was much lower than we expected.

We arrived in Oamaru around lunch time, so pulled into a grocery store to buy food for the next couple of days, and then drove to the waterfront to visit the blue penguin sanctuary and eat lunch.

Unfortunately for us the blue penguins were hunkered down in their dark nest boxes, so we could only see them in a darkened little building with red lights that 12 or so nests were attached to.

It was very interesting learning about them, and was a nice way to spend a couple of hours on Oamaru before heading further south along the coast to Dunedin.