Quick, grab it!” Even as I uttered the desperate plea to my wife, the hose seemed to spring to life. Writhing around her ankles like a malignant black cobra, it threatened to spew effluent everywhere except the drain, where I’d inserted it moments earlier. “You grab it!” Sally fired back as she retreated from a gallant attempt to retrieve the unruly hose that was about to relieve our motorhome of three days’ worth of sewage. “Phwoar! What’s that whiff?” chorused our four-year-old twins, Joe and Ellie, as they peered out of the shiny white behemoth.
A few more days into our self-drive tour of New Zealand’s South Island, we mastered the not-so-subtle art of emptying the waste tanks on our motorhome. In fact, we developed such a fondness for the lolloping great beast — which handled like an overloaded supermarket trolley — that we returned home contemplating buying one of our own.
Love ’em or hate ’em (and, let’s face it, when you’re stuck behind one on a bank holiday, it’s inevitably the latter), there’s no better way to roam than in a motorhome. Not only do they offer flexibility and self-sufficiency, most models offer levels of comfort undreamt of in the days of the old VW camper van. Whereas your typical VW, with its pop-up roof and flatulent exhaust, might have had little more than two coffin-sized berths and a lethal camping stove, our motorhome boasted three double beds, a fridge-freezer, a microwave, a four-ring cooker, a DVD player, a flat-screen TV, a shower and a toilet.
And if you’ve got kids, motorhome touring in New Zealand is definitely the way to go. To Joe and Ellie, the idea that you could have bedroom, kitchen, playroom and car rolled into one was almost too exciting to comprehend. “Are we really going to sleep in this?” they kept asking. “Really, really?” Yes, really. But motorhomes also have lots of practical advantages. For example, you can stick your children in seats 25ft away from the driver’s cab, so you don’t have to hear them whingeing on long journeys. And when it rains, you can at least park where there is some kind of view and keep warm and dry inside the van while you rustle up a meal.
Best of all, you can explore large swathes of country without having to lug suitcases in and out of hotels all the time. You only have to unpack once. And you only have to get used to one bed.
Don’t forget, though, that you have to make that bed. Literally. Our motorhome may have had the latest in TV technology, but when it came to beds, it was hardly cutting-edge. More like “cut your bloody fingers off”, in fact, as we grappled each evening with sliding plywood shelves, hinged legs and stow-away tables to build our beds. Once we had constructed the bases, the real fun started, as we tried to piece together 17 random-sized seat cushions into something vaguely resembling a mattress. It was like one of those infuriating Christmas-cracker puzzles where you have to move little square tiles around to form a picture. Not once did we manage to create a mattress that didn’t have a head-sized gap in it somewhere.
Three weeks living, travelling and sleeping in a motorhome inevitably caused the odd stressful moment. Even our regular duels with the waste hose, however, couldn’t overshadow the sheer buzz and sense of freedom of being let loose on South Island with our own life-support system and carte-blanche itinerary.
We took things easy at first. After collecting our motorhome in Christchurch, we drove 500 yards (stalling twice) to the International Antarctic Centre. Far from being a turgid museum, this superb attraction (twice voted best in New Zealand) provides an authentic experience of what it’s like to live and work on the great white continent. The Hagglund ride, in which an all-terrain vehicle hurls you around an assault course sculpted with crevasses and precipices, left us all looking pale — but it was nothing compared to the Antarctic storm simulation, in which you are shut in a giant freezer and pummelled with gale-force winds.
Later, back in the motorhome, my erratic driving and occasional tussle with second gear seemed positively trivial. We headed north from Christchurch, a dozen or so cars trailing behind us like cygnets in the wake of an old, rather dumpy swan.
On the road, I quickly realised that, unlike in the UK, there was nothing nerdy about driving a motorhome in New Zealand. During our first stop for fuel (about 55p per litre), the petrol-station attendant openly admired our vehicle. “That’s a nice camper you’ve got there,” she said, giving it a lingering once-over.
Part of the fun of driving across South Island is planning your route. With little more than a map and pencil, you can indulge in the ultimate dot-to-dot. Even in February (late high season), we rarely found any need to book a site at a motorhome park. And when we fell into the common trap of underestimating distances, we simply pulled off the road and spent a night “sans hook-up”.
Certain highlights, however, had to be built into our flexi-schedule — and whale-watching at Kaikoura was one of them. We booked two tours. The traditional boat trip in search of sperm whales was exciting enough — despite their tendency to up flukes and dive with a 30-minute lungful of air the moment we sighted them. But it was the smaller, low-key Albatross Encounter that proved more enthralling. To be surrounded by dozens of squawking, hissing sea birds with 10ft wingspans was one thing, but add to that a pod of 600 acrobatic dusky dolphins and you had a wildlife spectacle to rival anything on earth.
