We are enjoying working and living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, a city much busier than we are used to. Tiff is working across three different clinic sites for the one employer, which means we get the joy of experiencing Auckland peak hour traffic. But it has been a good way to see what life is like here. The days when Tiff is working at the clinic opposite our accommodation are our favourite cause she can walk to work in less than 5 minutes! So we are in our new city and working at a short-term job. How do we find our feet here and get cracking on the vanlife dream?
Well, we started finding our feet but exploring the small shopping district within walking distance of our accommodation and slowly branching out from there. We were lucky that there was an independent bookshop here! When in doubt, a bookstore is a great place to start (In Tiff’s opinion, that is). Whilst Tiff was eagerly searching through all the books by local Māori and Pākehā (Non-Māori New Zealanders) authors, Nathan had the good sense to look for some travel books. Good thing he did because he happened across a Lonely Planet book featuring the best day hikes in Aotearoa, New Zealand, 60 of them, to be precise!
Bam, we had our first little guide of how we were going to go about our time here in Aotearoa. We came here to get out of the country and truly experience it. What better way to do that than starting with hiking, or as the kiwis call it, tramping, around the country? They set the book out in sections of both islands, highlighting the best walks to do in those regions, so we already had a list of places to visit whilst we were in Auckland. Amazing! (We’ve linked here to the book on Amazon, but please, if you are interested in buying it, get it from a local bookstore instead, preferably an indie one!)
We are hikers, but we’d never done a proper full day hike before. You’d think we’d start slow with a shorter hike and walk our way up to a full day hike, right? Look, that would have been logical, but the appeal of doing the Auckland Coast to Coast hike before daylight savings stripped us of an extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon was too appealing. We jumped all in and did this one first on the last day of daylight savings.
We even got up early to watch the sunrise at Takapuna beach before driving into the city to start the hike! You can read all about the hike here, but to keep a long story short, it kicked our butts! We absolutely loved it though!! So now we knew what we wanted to do with a lot of our time in Aotearoa. Experiencing its stunning natural wonders, we had to figure out how to get ourselves a van and hit the road!
10 weeks of work for Tiff meant 10 weeks for Nathan to research into getting us the perfect van to travel around in and turn into our home. We cut it fine, let me tell you! There were a few vans we had our eye on, but almost all of them fell through for one reason or another. Some were being sold in other cities and just too hard to get to. Others had rust issues and one seller informed us after a lot of enquires that they wanted to keep it for another few months before selling. Time was slowly ticking away. We were getting a little nervous that we wouldn’t find a van and Tiff would have to extend her working contract. Then one van popped up that seemed perfect!
His Name was Trevor and his owner had gotten a new job and no longer needed him. We went and had a look at him and figured we could work with the bones of his current fit out to suit what we wanted in a van. A bit of back and forth negotiating happened. We asked for Trev to get a pre-purchase inspection and a new WoF (Warrant of Fitness, which is required in New Zealand for a vehicle to be roadworthy).
We were happy to hear there was no rust issues reported by either the WoF or the pre-purchase inspection as that seemed to be a prevailing issue over here. The other thing concerning us was the $12,000 owing on the vehicle. They assured us that would be paid once the sale happened, but it still made us nervous that they could leave us paying it ourselves. Luckily, it all went off without a hitch on the 5th of April! We were thrilled to finally have a van and even decided to keep the name Trev as it seemed to suit him.
Nathan had his work cut out for him with only a month to get a new fit out in Trev and make him all pretty for our 2yrs of travelling around Aotearoa. We were a little worried about time, but not overly stressed. Nathan, being a carpenter, knew what he was doing. We did a bit of a shopping spree to get everything we needed for the build and some luxury items to really make Trev into our home on wheels.
Tiff even picked out a colour scheme based on the book she got from that independent bookshop we visited at the start of our time in Auckland. See bookshops really do help to find your feet and create your home! It’s called Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly. Tiff absolutely loved this queer Y.A. Māori book set in Auckland. If you are visiting the city and love a good book based on where you are travelling, then this is the book to get!!
Back to Trevor
We had some big plans to make the interior more suited to our choice of living full time in a van. We also, of course, had plans to put in a bookshelf and make the interior prettier and more us, not to mention a little more Instagrammable. I mean, we are documenting our lives here, so we want to make it pretty where we can! Grand plans for a build in a month but we were confident we could do it! We probably would have done too if it weren’t for the fact that about two weeks after we got him, the solar power played up.
A couple of days in a workshop and over $2,000 later, we had Trev back
Apparently, the setup with the solar wiring and control panels was a cheap poorly executed job. A time and money set back that we definitely could have done without. But we pushed forward as we wanted to be done in time for Tiff’s last day of work. Annoyingly, exactly a week after the solar stopped working, the central locking on the sliding door gave up. Sadly, this was not such a quick fix, and we didn’t get Trev back from the workshop for nearly a week, leaving Nathan with three days to finish the work on Trev. Needles to say, we didn’t get it over the line.
We booked ourselves into an Airbnb in Devonport and with Trev parked out the front on the side of the road we finished up with the painting and final touches on the build. We ended up having to drive to an empty commercial street to finish off a few cuts and noisy parts of the project, too. But we got to explore Devonport in between finishing off Trev and waiting for the paint to dry. It’s a lovely old seaside town with quite a few cute little shops and a wonderful selection of eateries.
Our favourite places were Devon on the Wharf for amazing Turkish inspired Menu and Danryu Japanese Seafood restaurant. Three days at the Airbnb was just enough for us to get Trev finished and ready to live in! From here we ventured down to Takapuna Beach campsite to spend a couple of nights before heading off to a Book Fairy gathering in Hamilton and then onto wherever the road takes us for the next two months.
Like anyone who has ever brought a van or attempted a van building will tell you, sticking to a timeframe and a budget is next to impossible
We had hoped we’d done enough to be one of the lucky few that this rule didn’t apply to. Oh, how wrong we were! Not only did we end up spending more on materials than planned in the upgrades we did to Trev’s current van build we also spent an extra few grand on unplanned fixes before we even got to hit the road. Hopefully, this will be it for the extra costs and we’ve gotten the bumps in the road out of the way early on. We absolutely love the way we have gotten Trev looking, and we are so excited to live on the road for a few months before finding work again.
If we can leave you with any vanlife advice right now, it would be to always have more money and time in your budget than you think you will need. We thought we had left enough, and we still ended up spending more than what we had bargained for in our unexpected expenses part of the van budget. For a full breakdown on our vanlife costs in Aotearoa, New Zealand, check out this post. It’s been a stressful journey to get to the starting point of our vanlife dreams but now we are here and it’s looking pretty good. The freedom we get from having our home with us is already amazing. We can’t wait to see where the rest of the road takes us.
Keen for more inspo? Be sure to check out:
- 6 Steps for Eco Conscious Travel
- Day Hike – Auckland Coast to Coast
- Top 5 Free Things to do in Auckland
