Purchasing a Camper-van in New Zealand

Everyone, meet Peggy!

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If you’re asking yourself, “why Peggy?” then I’m about to tell you, and if not, please feel free to skip ahead. After purchasing the van in Auckland, we drove back to KeriKeri where we were staying with Ed’s parents. The following day we suited up in our grubbiest clothes and dove headfirst into disinfecting and detailing the van. While cleaning out a long forgotten cubby in the back of the van, Ed discovered a folded up piece of paper. Upon opening the folded paper, he became slightly uneasy as he read an obituary of a lovely elder woman. And you guessed it, her name was Peggy. It felt like destiny, so it was in that moment, we decided to call our van Peggy. Our hope was to honor deceased Peggy by taking her on one last New Zealand adventure per se.

*R.I.P. to Peggy from the obituary

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Why we chose to purchase over rent

After hours and hours of research about van travel around New Zealand, we concluded it was best for us to purchase a van rather than to rent one. We were staying in New Zealand for ~3 months, and hoping to spend a month+ traveling in a van. Listed below are the reasons behind why we chose to purchase over rent.

*For reference, here are a few details on Peggy: 2001 Toyota Estima – purchased for $5,411 NZD ($3,264 USD).

• The average daily cost of renting a van during the peak season (Dec to Feb) can be between $120 – $420 NZD per day ($82 – $288 USD). Therefore, if we were to rent a van for let’s just say, 31 days at the above prices, we would have paid ~$2,542 – $8,928 USD.
• The freedom to not feel like we had a set schedule to follow in order to return a rental on time.
• We could personalize the van to make it work for us exactly as we wanted.
• Van rental companies have many restricted roads and areas you cannot take their vans.
• It gave us our own mode of transportation while staying with Ed’s parents.
• The van is still kept at Ed’s parent’s home in KeriKeri, so we can use it again in the future when we return and others who visit them can use it too.
• It was very easy to purchase a vehicle in New Zealand; you don’t have to be citizens, have a NZ drivers license, or car insurance. Scary, I know.
• Peggy came “self-containment certified” and included all of the documents necessary to comply with the New Zealand self-containment laws. For more information on freedom camping in NZ and the self-containment requirements click here.

Peggy’s layout

Once we finally managed to organize all of our belongings and gear into Peggy, we stocked her full of food (and wine) and set off on our journey, heading south from KeriKeri. We did only make it 45 minutes south… but hey, it was a start!

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