Hi Phil - I'm late to this party but thought I'd throw in some comments. When Deb and I were in New Zealand in 2009, we had an unlocked Motorola quad-band GSM phone that Deb picked up online for about $40. We bought a sim card at the airport in Auckland (they put it in at the Vodaphone booth) and we mainly used it for short contact calls within NZ. At the end of the trip, we mailed the sim card to 1 of the people we met in Tauranga who liked the phone number and wanted to put it in his wife's phone. Overall cost was well under $100 and it gave us convenience and peace of mind.
I don't know if you've already got all your routing done, but I picked up Peter Mitchell's "New Zealand Motorcycle Atlas" to help with the trip planning. It is small enough to fit into the map case on your tank bag and has quite detailed maps in the atlas portion. I enjoyed the write-ups for the different routes and his recommendations fit my riding style. I see that it is listed as "out of print" on Amazon, so I don't know where you'd be able to pick it up. I have a slightly used (rain-stained) copy back in Grand Forks that you'd be welcome to have, but I'm not sure how I could get it to you.
I don't know how your maps load onto your GPS, but with the Garmin Zumo 550, I got caught initially with only loading 1 map onto the unit and found as I rode north from Hamilton to Auckland, we rode off the map coverage. Although they are fairly small islands, there was a lot of map detail and it took 3 maps to provide coverage of the country. It did provide some excitement having to navigate Auckland without the GPS until I corrected my error by loading all of the maps from the laptop.
We enjoyed the fact that most of the highways had a posted speed of 100 km/hr once you got outside the towns. The authorities didn't seem to have the nanny attitude of setting the speed limits slow enough to limit the damage and assumed you'd be smart enough to slow down if necessary. We did have a few encounters with sheep on the road as we came around the corner, so watch out for that. Also, don't follow too closely behind any of the livestock transport trucks as they're going uphill as they don't have any liquid containment and that brown slurry that comes out of the back of the truck on the corners is slippery and smelly. Don't say you haven't been warned.
We had a great time during our 6 weeks (about 3 on each island) and you have to keep your eyes on the weather. As the locals told us, if it is raining here, head to the other side of the island as the sun will be shining. If you think I might be able to help with anything else, send me a PM or an e-mail. 1 thing that just occurred to me was that most of the motels we stayed at had some form of small kitchen in them and we ended up doing more cooking than we expected as the price of eating in restaurants was fairly high. We also stayed in rented Holiday Houses in several locations when we were using the town as a base for several nights.
Hope you and Alain have a fantastic trip and ride safe! Like all the others, I'm looking forward to reading the travelogue.
I don't know if you've already got all your routing done, but I picked up Peter Mitchell's "New Zealand Motorcycle Atlas" to help with the trip planning. It is small enough to fit into the map case on your tank bag and has quite detailed maps in the atlas portion. I enjoyed the write-ups for the different routes and his recommendations fit my riding style. I see that it is listed as "out of print" on Amazon, so I don't know where you'd be able to pick it up. I have a slightly used (rain-stained) copy back in Grand Forks that you'd be welcome to have, but I'm not sure how I could get it to you.
I don't know how your maps load onto your GPS, but with the Garmin Zumo 550, I got caught initially with only loading 1 map onto the unit and found as I rode north from Hamilton to Auckland, we rode off the map coverage. Although they are fairly small islands, there was a lot of map detail and it took 3 maps to provide coverage of the country. It did provide some excitement having to navigate Auckland without the GPS until I corrected my error by loading all of the maps from the laptop.
We enjoyed the fact that most of the highways had a posted speed of 100 km/hr once you got outside the towns. The authorities didn't seem to have the nanny attitude of setting the speed limits slow enough to limit the damage and assumed you'd be smart enough to slow down if necessary. We did have a few encounters with sheep on the road as we came around the corner, so watch out for that. Also, don't follow too closely behind any of the livestock transport trucks as they're going uphill as they don't have any liquid containment and that brown slurry that comes out of the back of the truck on the corners is slippery and smelly. Don't say you haven't been warned.
We had a great time during our 6 weeks (about 3 on each island) and you have to keep your eyes on the weather. As the locals told us, if it is raining here, head to the other side of the island as the sun will be shining. If you think I might be able to help with anything else, send me a PM or an e-mail. 1 thing that just occurred to me was that most of the motels we stayed at had some form of small kitchen in them and we ended up doing more cooking than we expected as the price of eating in restaurants was fairly high. We also stayed in rented Holiday Houses in several locations when we were using the town as a base for several nights.
Hope you and Alain have a fantastic trip and ride safe! Like all the others, I'm looking forward to reading the travelogue.
