Sweet As Tees › Blog › How to Plan a New Zealand Road Trip: Routes, Costs & Tips
By The Sweet As Crew · · Updated — Sweet As Tees Blog
Ready to hit the road in Aotearoa? This guide covers everything you need to plan your trip — which routes to choose, how much to budget, campervan vs rental car, and the essential tips first-timers miss.
The Best New Zealand Road Trips — Drive the Long White Cloud | Sweet As TeesSweet As Tees 🥝The Best New Zealand Road TripsNew Zealand's best road trips take you through volcanic plateaus, fiords, wine regions and wild coastlines. Here are the drives every Kiwi should do at least on
🥝Two islands. Incredible diversity. Relatively empty roads. No destination more than a few hours from somewhere extraordinary.
New Zealand is one of the great road trip destinations on earth — and most Kiwis haven't done nearly enough of it. Whether you're in a campervan, a rental car, or your own slightly dodgy vehicle that you're hoping makes it, here are the drives worth doing.
🥝Drive north from Auckland up the spine of Northland to Cape Reinga, the northernmost tip of New Zealand where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. Stop at the Kauri Museum in Matakohe, swim at the Hokianga Harbour, drive on Ninety Mile Beach if you dare, and stand at the lighthouse at Cape Reinga as the waves crash below.
Return via the east coast through the Bay of Islands — Russell, Paihia, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds — and you have one of the great New Zealand road trips. Allow five to seven days to do it properly.
State Highway 5 through the central North Island takes you through the heart of New Zealand's geothermal wonderland. Rotorua's bubbling mud pools and geysers, Wai-O-Tapu's vivid thermal colours, Taupo's enormous lake sitting in a volcanic crater, and the Tongariro National Park beyond.
This is a landscape unlike anywhere else on earth — and it's sitting right in the middle of our island. Don't take it for granted.
Hawke's Bay is New Zealand's oldest wine region — sun-drenched, warm and producing world-class reds alongside crisp whites. The Art Deco architecture of Napier adds another dimension to what is already a beautiful drive through coastal countryside and vineyard after vineyard.
Take your time. Pull over at cellar doors. Stay for lunch. This is not a drive to rush.
🥝This is arguably New Zealand's greatest road trip — and it's worth doing the long way around. Head north from Christchurch through the Waimakariri Gorge, over the Lewis Pass, down to the wild West Coast and its incredible pancake rocks at Punakaiki, through the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers, over the Haast Pass and into Wanaka and Queenstown.
The landscape changes dramatically every few hours. Rain forest becomes glacier becomes river gorge becomes mountain lake. Allow at least five days. A week is better.
The drive from Te Anau to Milford Sound is one of the most dramatic in the world. The Homer Tunnel — blasted through solid rock — emerges into a valley that simply shouldn't exist. Waterfalls cascade off vertical cliffs. The scale of everything is almost incomprehensible.
Go early in the morning to beat the tour buses. Stop at every pull-off. Take photos even though they won't do it justice.
The Catlins in the far south of the South Island is one of New Zealand's best kept secrets — a stretch of wild coastline with waterfalls, sea lion colonies, petrified forests and the kind of dramatic beauty that comes from being genuinely remote.
This is not a drive for people in a hurry. The roads are windy, the distances between towns are real, and the rewards require some effort to find. That's exactly the point.
The drive north from Christchurch along the Kaikōura coast — mountains on one side, Pacific Ocean on the other — is one of the most scenically dramatic coastal drives in New Zealand. Stop in Kaikōura to see the sperm whales, swim with dolphins or eat crayfish on the pier.
The 2016 earthquake severely damaged this road and coastline. Watching how it has been rebuilt and recovered is itself a remarkable story of resilience.
🥝A proper New Zealand road trip requires certain things:
That last one we can help with. At Sweet As Tees, we make designs that capture the Kiwi spirit — perfect for road trips, adventures and everywhere in between.
Get out there. New Zealand is waiting. Sweet as. 🥝
Proud to be Kiwi? Wear it on your chest.
Shop Kiwi Pride Tees →Already know your route? Check out our definitive drive-by-drive guide: Best Road Trips in New Zealand — The Ultimate NZ Drive Guide.
Tags: new zealand road trips, nz road trip, driving new zealand, best drives nz, new zealand self drive, nz campervan, road trip aotearoa