About New Zealand Unwrapped

New Zealand Unwrapped began in September 2010, a few weeks after the two of us landed in Wellington to spend our first six months living in and travelling around New Zealand. We arrived on a working-holiday footing with a plan to work the rest out as we went, and writing it down as we learned it seemed the useful thing to do.

The idea was simple. Most of what we could find online at the time was either a polished tourist brochure or something written only for gap-year backpackers, and neither told you what actually setting up a life here was like. So this became the guide we wished we'd had: the practical stuff, tested by doing it ourselves. How to get a SIM card and a bank account and an IRD number. What things really cost. How to buy or hire a campervan without getting stung. Where the work was, from fruit picking to WWOOFing to a ski-field season. What Wellington is like when it stops being a place you visit and starts being home.

Then, in December, we bought a van and drove the South Island end to end, and the guide turned into a diary for a while: off the ferry at Picton, through Marlborough, over the hill to Golden Bay.

Life moved on and the site did not, which is the honest story of a lot of good blogs. Rather than let it disappear when the old hosting finally lapsed, it has been rebuilt exactly as it was and kept here for the memory of the trip. The advice is a decade old now, so treat the prices and the phone plans as history, not a recommendation. Every photograph is our own, taken along the way.

The road ended in January 2011. Nothing new will happen here, and that's rather the point.