Those who plan on visiting New Zealand to follow the Wallabies during their upcoming Rugby World Cup campaign are likely to have one North Island road trip on the agenda: a trip down from Auckland (where the Wallabies play Ireland) to Wellington (where they\u2019re highly likely to beat the USA).\u00a0 This trip can be done in one day, but it pays to allow a night\u2019s break in the middle.\u00a0The trip from Auckland to Wellington is one of the classic New Zealand road trips, and you\u2019ve got a number of ways to go about it.<\/p>\n
The most straightforward way to get from Auckland to Wellington is via State Highway (SH) 1.\u00a0 This takes you down the middle
\nof the North Island for the bulk part and then the lower western side.\u00a0It\u2019s by far the most popular route, as it\u2019s more direct. However, you don\u2019t have to stick on this highway the whole way \u2013 you can choose to go down the east of Lake Taupo on SH1, or you can turn right south of Tokoroa and go down the less popular western shore following SH32, which has a lot more forest.\u00a0 The two routes meet up again at Turangi.\u00a0 After this, you get to what\u2019s known as the \u201cDesert Road\u201d, but if you come from, say, Alice Springs, try not to snigger when you hear the locals calling it this \u2013 it\u2019s not that much of a desert, but at least it has a striking cluster of active volcanoes.\u00a0 The volcanoes are unlikely to go up and close the roads, but the Desert Road can be closed by snow.\u00a0 This is unlikely in the middle of September, but isn\u2019t impossible, so keep and eye on the weather forecast and take warm clothing if the weather looks a bit iffy.\u00a0As you keep going south, things get a little tame (and the roads a little more crowded) as you get south of Bulls, but if you head east along SH3 to Palmerston North (notable for the wind farms \u2013 you can\u2019t miss them) and through the Manawatu Gorge, you get onto SH2, which is more interesting from a driver\u2019s perspective, as it\u2019s got more hill work and corners to have fun with.<\/p>\n
If you take SH2 all the way down, it\u2019s a lot longer, but it goes through some more rugged bits of the country, and is the route to take if you like cornering and hills, as SH2 has plenty of these.\u00a0 This follows the coast of the Bay of Plenty and then cuts through the hill country to Gisborne, the first city in the world to see the sun, thanks to the International Date Line.\u00a0 If you\u2019re really keen, you can go around all of East Cape via SH35.\u00a0 Fill up with petrol at Opotiki, take picnic food rather than expecting takeaways and book a night at Gisborne if you do.\u00a0 After Gisborne, SH2 crosses a few more sets of steep hills (watch out for wild goats on the road and for the very impressive railway bridge at Mohaka) before getting into tamer country around Napier and Hastings.\u00a0\u00a0 If you\u2019re fed up with hills at this stage, you can cut through the Manawatu Gorge to Palmerston North and get onto SH1 again, and get onto the highway into Wellington.<\/p>\n
An alternative road trip starting from Auckland is to head north along the rest of SH1 to the very top of the North Island at Cape Reinga.\u00a0 You have to take a dirt road to get to the very northernmost tip, but a 4×4 isn\u2019t necessary and you can do it in a little hatchback if you like. http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/offers-zaim\/zaymer-online-zaymi.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those who plan on visiting New Zealand to follow the Wallabies during their upcoming Rugby World Cup campaign are likely to have one North Island road trip on the agenda: a trip down from Auckland (where the Wallabies play Ireland) to Wellington (where they\u2019re highly likely to beat the USA).\u00a0 This trip can be done […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12429,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions\/12429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}