Confessions of a freedom camper
Sam Shead finds there’s no room to manoeuvre his self-contained camper
We risked it in our camper van just outside Wanaka. We’d found a patch of grass that we thought we might be able to freedom camp on, just off a road by Glendhu Bay, where Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel owns a 193ha farm.
“I’m scared Sam,” my girlfriend, Ally, tells me before she attempts to drift off to sleep in the back of the converted Ford Transit we’re renting. She’s worried someone is going to come knocking on our door and give us a $200 fine we can’t afford for breaking New Zealand’s freedom camping laws.
As a Brit who has spent close to a month travelling around this beautiful country in a self-contained camper, I have to say I found the whole experience to be rather stressful and unnecessarily expensive.
My girlfriend and I are respectful people who care deeply for the environment. As are, I suspect, the overwhelming majority of campers who travel around New Zealand. We don’t want to poo in your bushes, urinate in your rivers, or leave litter on your roads. We want to leave places as we find them. We also want to stay in the wilderness and get away from it all. Today, campers travelling around the South Island typically have to pay to stay with hordes of others at designated Department of Conserva- Sam Shead risked freedom camping, but more often than not had to pay a huge fee to share a busy, noisy campsite and not use its facilities. tion (DoC) campsites or other official campsites. London, which we’ve recently left, is a busy city full of people and cars. But, it turns out, so are many of New Zealand’s campsites. What’s worse is many of the campsites are also a rip-off. We paid more than $60 in some towns. When you’re trying to travel on a backpacker budget and you’re already paying more than $150 a day to hire a basic, self-contained camper that allows you to stay practically anywhere, these camping fees are annoying. The campsites we paid for often had slightly better facilities than the ones on board our camper but we could have lived without them, and we often did. There were several occasions where we forked out for an expensive campsite and didn’t use anything there as we were perfectly happy in our van. Occasionally we got