We've got a long awaited work trip to New Zealand coming up. After years of knowing it would happen at some point, it looks like mid-May (just a little over a month away!) is the timeframe, so I am limited on time to plan and could use some help.
tl;dr, these are my main questions, but I have a few more details below:
1) any resources you found useful (guidebooks, YouTube channels, blogs, websites, etc) I don't use Facebook, so I won't be hitting up any Facebook groups.
2) Recommendations for dressing for the fall weather in the North and South, so we have an idea of what to pack. I'm used to four seasons, but we live in the desert so we don't deal with a ton of rain.
3) What part of the south island would you recommend we focus our attention on, given weather and road conditions and how amazing the whole island is? (We've got 5-7 days to work with)
4) What are good evening activities around Auckland that we can do after work, and what would you recommend for a solo traveler during the day while everyone else is working?
(We will make our way to Hobbiton no matter what, but any museums, walking tours, or short hikes/walks close to Auckland would be nice!)
The actual work requires a few days in Auckland, but the boss has no problem with us padding our trip with vacation days, so we'll likely have about 10 non-travel days to work with.
There's no way we'll be able to see it all in 10 days, especially with some of the time spent on actual work, so I want to focus in on a couple regions and just assume we can someday come back to see the rest.
This trip includes myself, my husband, and one co-worker will be sharing a rental car with us for the working days, and after the official working days are over we'll be doing our own thing.
We're all relatively young and active and would enjoy hiking. We're also all big Lord of the Rings nerds, that figures very prominently in my mind as we're planning. I love history and would love to learn about Maori history and culture as well.
My rough plan so far:
3 days in Auckland: working with some evening sight seeing and activities.
2 days: visiting Hobbiton and possibly glowworm caves or Rotorua. We'll return our company funded rental car and part ways with our co-worker. My husband and I would fly to Queenstown or Christchurch and rent our own car.
5-6 days: driving around the south island, enjoying some of the natural beauty, going hiking. We won't try to see the whole island, so which region should we focus on?
Thanks all! I've had to plan a similar trip before, only to have it postponed/cancelled 20 minutes after we bought our tickets. I'm crossing my fingers that nothing goes wrong with the paperwork this time!