The Art of Freedom Camping

Here are some thoughts and observations on Freedom Camping based on our experience over the last three months of travel. We have chosen to travel this way because it is immensely flexible – you don’t have to book ahead, you are not corralled into commercial sites with all the campsite trappings that we have no interest in – and you get to stay in some amazing, beautiful places.

An average commercial campsite in New Zealand will charge up to $40 (roughly £20) per person, per night but that ought to give you access to holiday park type facilities – certainly decent showers, a plug in point for power, maybe a pool and a laundromat (for which you will pay extra) and things like free wi-fi. Department of Conservation sites (DOC sites) charge up to $20pp depending on the facilities offered, most are usually $13pp, but for that you will probably have access to a toilet of varying quality and maybe some kitchen sinks to wash up in, but you are unlikely to get a proper shower for instance and no power. They tend to be located in areas of outstanding natural beauty and it is sometimes worth paying the premium to access some fantastic locations.

The real trick though is to find the places where you can camp free of charge, either in areas set aside for the purpose or even, in some areas, at the side of the road (we camped two nights in a beautiful spot on the road at the end of the runway at the airfield in Wanaka and were entertained in the morning by dozens of sky divers landing around us).

Freedom campers are not universally welcomed by the populace, especially those campers (usually young people) who are travelling in converted cars and vans which barely meet the ‘self-contained’ requirements. By ‘self-contained ‘ I mean the ability to go to the loo and cook and wash up without needing to access external facilities.

The joy of travelling in New Zealand is that there are hundreds of official places to freedom camp and with the use of an app like CamperMate you can quickly work out which ones are worth visiting, how to avoid rancid toilets and where you can dump your ‘grey’ and ‘black’ water when your holding tanks reach capacity. The issue of the availability of toilets in or near camp grounds is an important one even if you are self-contained as a good loo nearby extends the period you can camp out in the wild before you need to find a ‘dump station’. (It is amazing how some of the more basic human requirements become the topic of every day conversations – I apologise to readers who are finding this subject matter a little distasteful!).

One aspect of camping that currently doesn’t work well is disposing of rubbish. In general the rule is ‘pack in and pack out’ i.e. take all your rubbish with you and leave nothing behind. But take it to where? Very few areas provide communal bins and you are left surreptitiously stuffing your rubbish into litter bins in the street, which is not what is intended, or taking it to the public amenity sites where you will be charged $9 to dispose of a small bag of rubbish – the same charge as if you took a large load.

Freedom camping requires making compromises. Our van is equipped with a solar panel which keeps the fridge running but isn’t man enough to allow us also to run the tv/DVD player, the extractor fan, the heater and all the other mod cons our van is equipped with. We prefer to pursue the freedom approach and therefore look to swim in rivers and lakes whenever the opportunity arises (well Sally does, I need the water to be a bit warmer before I expose my torso to it) which means our on-board shower is also redundant. (Rather than let you assume wrongly that all is stinky in the Theo van let me assure you that as an alternative I have perfected the art of washing in cold showers by exposing small bits of my body at a time to the icy blast while gasping breathlessly!).

Our camp ‘sites’ have varied enormously. We have stayed overnight in supermarket car parks (very convenient for picking up a cup of coffee and croissant at the in-store cafe in the morning), in public parks, in pub car parks, in forest glades, on cliffs over looking the ocean and beside remote lakes high up in the mountains. Sometimes we have camped alone, sometimes we have camped cheek by jowel with dozens of other vans. Almost without exception we have encountered friendly travellers to share with – mainly, it has to be said, young German and French people on working visas but also plenty of Kiwis who, like us, enjoy the freedom this style of travel provides.

We have suffered occasional abuse from, I assume mainly young, kiwis who take it upon themselves to try and drive away freedom campers by sounding their horns as they drive past or by driving into the camping area and doing ‘donuts’ in the early hours of the morning, but this is thankfully a rare occurrence.

It is true, some freedom sites are not well looked after and do get abused but our experience is that if the local authority are clear about the rules and make efforts to enforce them, then the sites are well maintained and everyone is happy. Top marks in that regard go to Napier, Queenstown (belatedly) and Renwick where the authorities are very firm in applying the rules. Some places by contrast have seemingly allowed a free for all (Taupo springs to mind as one such) and frankly it is not a good experience for the campers or the locals.

A big shout out needs to go to Lumsden – a small, nowhere town on the main highway between Queenstown and Invercargill. There would be no obvious reason to stop there except the town decided to make special provision for freedom campers, both those in self-contained vehicles (who are welcome to park anywhere in town!) and those not in self contained vehicles. The latter are provided for in the very centre of town around what was the railway station. There are good toilets and washing up facilities and it is gently managed by a local man on a voluntary basis together with his dog. Instead of being a place just to drive through with few facilities the camping community help support a number of businesses including several cafes, a good grocery store, a fish and chip shop which cooks some of the best chips I have ever tasted, and a hotel. That strikes me as a win- win as far as I can see.

So, to wrap up this treatise on freedom camping here are a few more pictures of some of the places we stayed on both North and South Islands. Let’s hope it is a tradition that is allowed to flourish but to do so it needs communities to have courage and to maintain a generosity of spirit. The payback is potentially significant.