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MANY a New Zealander remembers long summer holidays spent in campgrounds, where the accommodation was a bit basic — a tent — but where the holiday was sociable because the tents were all right next to each other.
But this often seems like a vanishing way of life, as campgrounds are taken over by urban sprawl. In many places, their land is now worth too much just to have tents on top for a few weeks of the year, and to grow grass otherwise.
Tents on top, for next to nothing as well. A 2006 story in New Zealand Geographic called ‘The Disappearance of Campgrounds’ describes the last days of Kawerau Falls Lakeside Holiday Park in Queenstown:
Below the yellow caravan at Kawarau Falls Lakeside Holiday Park, Lake Wakatipu is spread out like the very best marketing portfolio. For $13 a night campers can read, sunbathe, cook and sleep within metres of what has since proved to be a multimillion-dollar view.
Here’s a photo of the area where the Kawerau Falls Lakeside Holiday Park used to be. It was on the lakeshore just behind the small cluster of islands to the right of the centre of the photograph.
As the article went to press, the former camping ground where you could pitch a tent for $13 a night was:
now on its way to becoming Kawarau Falls Station, a $300-million development that will include visitor accommodation, apartments and private residences — an alpine lakeside getaway for the wealthy.
Here’s a zoomed-in view from the same spot as the photo above. The development that replaced the campground is just to the right of the bridge. It’s quite intensive these days and includes the local Hilton Hotel, a far cry from the canvas tents of the campsite’s last summer, exactly twenty years ago.
In the article, a person called Arnie, who had lived at the Kawerau Falls campground in a caravan for the previous 11 years, lamented that he was going to have to up sticks for somewhere less convenient.
Which reminds me that, just a few days ago, I read an Otago Daily Times story called ‘Caravan storage to go at Arrowtown holiday park’ (7 January).
That story said that an Australian firm called Hampshire Holiday Parks, which had acquired five local campgrounds in Queenstown, Arrowtown, and the Wānaka area in 2023, was evicting long-stay caravans from its Arrowtown campground as of this coming April.
About fifty caravans were parked up at the campground, with their owners paying storage fees and, in some cases, visiting the campground regularly throughout the year. A letter of protest had been circulated, with the following message:
“As storage caravans, we have always paid storage fees, with some owners spending 50–70 nights a year in the park, contributing to the financial intake of the community,” the letter said.
“But this will all drop away, as most people will only come for the major holiday breaks, not the long weekends or five-night stays that a lot of us do. . . .”
Hampshire Holiday Parks said that this only applied to its Arrowtown campground and not the four other ones it owned in the district.
These were Hampshire Holiday Parks — Queenstown Lakeview (in Cemetery Road close to the town’s famous gondola), and, at the Wānaka end of the Crown Range Road, in Wānaka, at Glendhu Bay, and in Albert Town.
Still, whoever wrote the protest letter seemed unconvinced, and also complained that a foreign firm should not have been allowed to buy up so many holiday parks in one fairly small region.
It all did seem like a way of life was slowly and gradually coming to an end; one that also had the potential to increase the level of homelessness, if people can’t live cheaply in caravans long-term.
A 2019 New Zealand Herald article called ‘The myth of New Zealand’s disappearing campgrounds’ mentions the work of an Otago University researcher named Leonardo Nava Jiménez, who attempted to tot up all the campgrounds in New Zealand over the years for his PhD thesis, The Evolution of the Camp.
Surprisingly, Nava found that there were twice as many paid or commercial campgrounds in the New Zealand of today as there were fifty years ago. in the golden age of camping holidays.
For instance, a new commercial campground opened up in Queenstown in 2022, at a spot quite close to the site of the old $13-a-night Kawerau Falls campsite. This new campsite is called Driftaway, and one blog reckons it to be the best in town, at least if you want a place with brand-new facilities.
However, it is really expensive compared to the old place, a non-powered grass site going for $84 a night as of the time of writing.
What Nava also found was that freedom camping was much more common in the past, and that if you lump in the ever-increasing restrictions on freedom camping, it does make it look as if New Zealand’s campsites are disappearing. A case in point is the Queenstown Lakes District Council’s Lake Hayes Reserve, where people used to be able to camp back in the day.
And a lovely place it would have been to camp as well.
Unfortunately, in 2018, the QLDC passed a resolution that banned camping at Lake Hayes and two other QLDC reserves.
And while new campgrounds have opened up, they tend to be more inland and in more remote places.
There is no doubt that it is getting harder to camp anywhere where there is water — close to a river, a lake, or the beach — and especially so if there is a growing town nearby as well.
The cost of campsites is also going up. I’m staying at Glendhu Bay right now. Its camping sites are much cheaper than Driftaway, but still in the $42 to $48 a night range.
Of course, I’m not saying it's not worth it!
Perhaps the most interesting camping in Queenstown is Queenstown Holiday Park Creeksyde. It is at a really handy location in Robins Road, close to the Queenstown Library, a couple of supermarkets, and other central facilities.
Quirky and countercultural, Creeksyde bills itself as “The world’s first environmentally certified holiday park.” It has been in the ownership of the same family since it was founded in 1987.
Creeksyde offers sites for caravans at around $67 a night (you can’t pitch a tent anymore), and $77 for EVs with charging facilities; though of course by the same token this is probably the best deal you will get in what is, these days, downtown Queenstown. And $10 extra for a charge is pretty cheap compared to a tank of gas.
Still, it is all a bit different these days to roughing it in a canvas tent in some beachside spot with just about no facilities, but where there is just about no paperwork of any kind to contend with as well.
On top of that, it also seems that fewer and fewer people are interested in tenting these days, with a shift toward cabin-type accommodation and campervans (pretty much unheard of fifty years ago other than in a hippie-van sense), with more and more mod cons including places to charge modern devices.
I would have included an old-timey half-faded family camping photo from the 1970s if I had had time, just to finish this article off, but I think it’s in an album at the other end of the country. We’re definitely talking about a way of life that predated the Internet era, there.
There’s more about this lovely area in one of my books, The Sensational South Island, and in other posts in this publication and on my website a-maverick.com.
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