NZ for a week?..

ION08

Hey all.

Im currently in Oz and will be leaving here around mid January.
Im 23 and just want to see bit of NZ and have a bit of fun there before going back home!

I'll be goin on my own and for about 1 week. I'll be leaving from Sydney so just wondering does anyone here have any recommendations on what the best city to fly out to in NZ is? Where to stay? What to do for the week? etc

Cheers for any advice!

esharknz

People rave about the south island (so I hear, bad thing is I'm a North Island-bred kiwi and rarely went to the south!). Should be plenty of flights into christchurch (Air NZ, Jetstar etc) from Sydney.

A few things from here - great train journey over to greymouth, very scenic. Lots of adventure in Queenstown, and I believe there are direct flights in there from Sydney at least. It can get fairly booked up at times there though, so I'd have confirmed accommodation at least. You could easily spend the week in the south island.

Not sure how far you want to travel, there is also the option of parts of the north island (I read of a new trans-tasman service into Rotorua from Sydney, and Auckland has a wide range of airlines doing the tasman crossing). Auckland could be fun for a day or two, you can jump off the sky tower etc, Rotorua is a tourist town (I took my Irish husband there last year and cringed at the cheese factor of some of the attractions, although he enjoyed them!). Liked the luge there etc mind you and a few adventure type attractions there.

If you want to do internal flights, then check out airnz.co.nz, qantas.co.nz, jetstar.co.nz and flypacificblue.com. I think the houseoftravel.co.nz do comparisons between the airlines too (but charge an admin fee, so you could check them out and then book directly with the airline(s)). Most flights won't be longer than an hour and a half at most.

Have a great time in NZ, and bring a jersey just in case (even if it's summer, trust me).

ION08

Thanks for the tips.

By the sounds of it south island is def were I should be looking to go!.. will reasearch there a bit further

I've heard about jumping off the sky tower alright (.. with a bungee i presume? ) .. dont think id have the balls for that!! .. not on my own anyway

Delorian

If you're only going for a week dude, you won't get a chance to do much. Ppl underestimate the size of this place, as I did, and the roads are not motorways, so most places take longer to get to than they should. My advise would be to hit the south island when you've more time to enjoy yourself. If you're passing through (i.e. not going back to Oz, and are going on towards home), or even if you are going back to Oz, I would advise you fly to and from Auckland and spend a week north of there doing the Bay of Islands. That's what I plan to do after New Year. Get a bus tour and let the hair down on the beaches and islands.

Alternatively you could go to Queenstown, have a ball there, try and get in Milford and leave from Queenstown or Christchurch, but it'll be harder and more expensive to fly into and out of. And if you ever come back here for a longer trip, you'll most likely be there again, where-as up north you might not be.

Just my 2 cent anyway. It's an awesome country, wherever you go you'll have a ball.

robinph

ION08 wrote: »

I've heard about jumping off the sky tower alright (.. with a bungee i presume? ) .. dont think id have the balls for that!! .. not on my own anyway

I did that within about 3 hours of getting off the 24+ hours of flying to get to NZ the first time round. It's not actually a bungy, it is a controlled drop from the top of the tower, tallest in the southern hemisphere(?), by a fly wheel controlled cable, no bouncing back up or anything. A relatively calm introduction to some of the crazy stuff you can do in NZ, the woman who "jumped" off right before me had only one leg and she still did it once they had strapped her and a crutch to the cables properly.