New Zealand: The North Island
When to go
November to April. The seasons are reversed: December to February is summer, and from mid-December to the end of January the New Zealand school holidays fill the hotels and Hobbiton, so book well ahead. March and April are warm, settled and quieter. In winter the North Island stays mild in Auckland, but snow can close the Desert Road past Tongariro, and the volcanic plateau is cold.
The stops
Interactive map of the route on our site ›
- Auckland2 nights
The city is built on a field of some fifty volcanoes, and cones such as Maungawhau, Mount Eden, stand among the houses with a view of both harbours. For most of the years from 1959 to 1980 its mayor was Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, a Jew born in Sheffield, and the Auckland Hebrew Congregation still keeps a synagogue and a community centre in the city.
- Hamilton NZ2 nights
Named after Captain John Hamilton, a naval officer killed at Gate Pā in 1864, it is the largest inland city of New Zealand, on the banks of the Waikato River. Hamilton Gardens, south of the centre, is a series of enclosed gardens, each in the style of a different time and culture, from a Chinese scholar’s garden to an Italian Renaissance one.
- Waitomo Glowworm Cavesstop on the way
Limestone caves whose ceilings are covered in glowworms, the larvae of a gnat found only in New Zealand, that shine blue to lure insects. The Māori chief Tane Tinorau and the English surveyor Fred Mace explored the main cave together in 1887, floating in on a raft of flax, and the tour still ends in a boat gliding in silence under the lights.
- Hobbitonstop on the way
The Shire of The Lord of the Rings, on the Alexander family’s working sheep farm outside Matamata, which Peter Jackson’s scouts spotted from the air in 1998. The set was taken down after the first films and rebuilt to last for The Hobbit, with its hobbit holes, its mill and the Green Dragon inn, where the tour ends with a drink. Visits are by booked tour only.
- Rotorua2 nights
A town on a volcanic caldera that smells of sulphur, with steam rising from drains and gardens. At Te Puia, Pōhutu is the largest active geyser in the southern hemisphere and erupts many times a day. The Tudor-style bathhouse of 1908 in the Government Gardens became the town museum, closed since 2016 for earthquake strengthening.
- Wai-O-Tapustop on the way
A thermal park of coloured craters and pools south of Rotorua. The Champagne Pool is orange at the rim from arsenic and antimony and bubbles with carbon dioxide, and every morning at 10:15 a guide drops soap into the Lady Knox Geyser to set it off; be there early for a place on the stands.
- Huka Fallsstop on the way
The Waikato, the longest river in New Zealand, leaves Lake Taupō and is squeezed into a rock channel only some fifteen metres wide before it shoots out over the falls in a white-blue torrent. The footbridge over the channel is the place to stand, and the walk from Spa Park in Taupō follows the river to it.
- Taupo2 nights
The town sits on the shore of Lake Taupō, the largest lake in New Zealand, which fills the caldera of a supervolcano. Its last great eruption, about 1,800 years ago, was one of the most violent anywhere on Earth in the last five thousand years, and the pumice of it still lies under the farms around the lake.
- Tongarirostop on the way
In 1887 the Ngāti Tūwharetoa chief Te Heuheu Tūkino IV gave the sacred peaks of Tongariro to the nation so that they would not be sold off, and they became New Zealand’s first national park. The Desert Road runs along its east side past Ruapehu and the perfect cone of Ngāuruhoe, the Mount Doom of the films; for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing you need a full day and a shuttle.
- Ohakuneone night
A town at the foot of Ruapehu and the base for Tūroa, the ski field on the mountain’s southern side. The farms around it grow much of the North Island’s carrots, and a giant fibreglass carrot, put up in the 1980s, stands at the entrance to town.
- Taihapestop on the way
A railway town in the high farm country of the central North Island that calls itself the gumboot capital of the world. A giant gumboot of corrugated iron stands on the main road, and every year on Gumboot Day the town holds a contest to see who can throw a rubber boot the farthest.
- Feildingone night
A farming town on the Manawatū plains, laid out from 1874 on land bought by the Emigrants and Colonists Aid Corporation and named after one of its directors, Colonel William Feilding. Its streets meet at Manchester Square, after the Manchester Block the town was built on, and it has won the title of New Zealand’s most beautiful town many times.
- De Molen, Foxtonstop on the way
In the main street of Foxton stands De Molen, a full-size working replica of a seventeenth-century Dutch windmill, finished in 2003, that grinds flour. It honours the Dutch who settled in New Zealand after the Second World War, and the museum beside it, Te Awahou Nieuwe Stroom, tells their story together with that of the local Māori.
- Wellington2 nights
The capital, at the windy southern tip of the North Island, with the national museum Te Papa on the waterfront and the round parliament building called the Beehive. In the 1870s Sir Julius Vogel, a Jew born in London, was twice premier of New Zealand and borrowed abroad to build its railways; the Wellington Hebrew Congregation was founded in the city’s first decades.
What it costs
Eighty dollars a night is the room. The car and the fuel are yours. There are only a few toll roads in New Zealand, one of them the Northern Gateway north of Auckland, which this route does not use; they have no booths and are paid online within a few days. The extras worth budgeting are the booked tours: Hobbiton is visited only on a guided tour, and the Waitomo caves and the thermal parks of Rotorua all charge entry.
What to know
Three things. One: New Zealand drives on the left, and most of the roads are a single lane each way with few places to overtake; use the passing lanes and pull over to let a queue behind you go by. Two: your licence. You may drive for up to a year on a foreign licence, but if it is not in English you must carry an International Driving Permit or an approved English translation with it. Three: one-lane bridges. Many rivers are crossed by bridges one car wide; a sign shows who gives way, and the smaller red arrow is the one that waits. And read the rental contract: most companies exclude cover on certain gravel roads and do not let their cars cross to the South Island on the ferry, so you change cars at the terminals.
Roads, tolls and rules
New Zealand drives on the left. The motorway runs only out of Auckland and into Wellington; between them State Highway 1 is mostly a two-lane road through farmland and over the volcanic plateau. Distances look short, but an hour on the map is often more behind trucks and campervans, so this route keeps every day short, with a night in Hamilton, Ohakune and Feilding on the way. Fill up in Taupō or Tūrangi before the Desert Road.
Travel New Zealand: The North Island
The route on our site, with a room up to $80 every night.