Introducing Cyril!

Meet Cyril! Cyril’s a 2004 Transit Camper Van who’s had a busy life running mainly international tourists around the hot spots of beautiful Aotearoa. But like us, over the last six months he’s led a much more sedentary life, resting in a yard with many other campers, yearning, I am sure, like us, for a more active existence again.

Once we allowed ourselves to start thinking outside the box a few years ago we came up with a number of different adventures we’d like to embark on over the coming years. Of course sailing around South East Asia was at the top of the list, but more adventures joined the list and we thought it best to leave the corporate world sooner rather than later to have a chance of fitting at least some of them in. Van life appealed to us – much like cruising on a yacht, it represents small and low impact living in a home that is also a vehicle. After Helen spent a couple of months in Ecuador last year, we thought that South America would be a great place to spend a few years living and travelling in a van at some time in the future.

Covid taught us, if nothing else, to be flexible with planning and when we made the difficult decision to leave India for the safety of NZ (read about it here – https://ripeningnicely.com/2020/08/22/abandon-ship/) it was quite a straight forward link to taking an opportunity to exploring beautiful NZ in much greater depth, by camper van.

I’ve lived away from NZ for 24 years, since completing the last year of my architecture degree in Geelong, near Melbourne in Australia. Whilst living in Australia, Singapore, Prague, The Channel Islands and Dubai, I’ve of course returned for vacations on average every two years or so. I feel like I’ve become pretty good at being a tourist in my own country, although only for up to two weeks at a time. The difference now is that we’re looking forward to moving much more slowly. We figure we’ll be here for at least six months, so that should give us the opportunity to see the many nooks and crannies of NZ.

We had a vague idea of what we wanted in a van – top of the list was that it shouldn’t be too big to easily manoeuvre. When the kids were young we had a wonderful holiday in NZ in a six-berth camper, complete with a luton bed protruding bulbous-like above the cab. We needed that size for the five of us, but it was what I imagine driving an aircraft carrier to be like – hell in the supermarket car park, and rather “light on the helm” on the open road. (Although that didn’t stop Helen winding it up and clocking a speeding ticket on a straight near Tekapo). So we knew that bigger isn’t necessarily better. Second was a built in shower/toilet room. We want to be able to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and “freedom camp” and want to avoid the surprisingly expensive camping grounds as much as possible. And following that were other preferences – standing head room, walk through from the driving cab, gas heating… etc… Oh, and a modest budget too. Considering that we want to keep Cyril for just six or so months, we didn’t want to spend too much up front, risking losing too much cash when we come to sell him on. Our concern is amplified by our fear that by then there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of ex-rentals on the market.

We would have loved an EV/Electric Vehicle, but despite its “Clean Green” marketing label, New Zealand is embarrassingly slow about opening up to alternative energies, and the products and infrastructure to support them just aren’t here yet. We’d tried to rent an EV car for our NZ vacation last year, but we were afraid that it would turn into a logistic planning exercise for the next battery top up, not a relaxing vacation. We expect that the impact of running a dirty diesel will be minimised by our intention to average well less than 50 kilometers travel per day.

As you’d expect, with a dearth of international tourists, there’s quite a supply of campers on the market and this is exaggerated by a number of rental companies taking the opportunity to downsize their fleets, maintain cash flow, and to meet the now reduced demand from the “new reality”. Tourism used to be NZ’s second biggest export after milk products, and like many countries, NZ is pushing its citizens see their own country and to kick-start the tourism economy. But Kiwis will never be able to fill the void left by 3.8 million international arrivals per year. Yes, I was amazed when I googled that! There’s only 5 millions Kiwis living here!

I’d started looking at second hand campers even when we were back in India and had plenty of time to kill, but had to force myself not to get too deep because of course those ones would no longer be available by the time we got here and through Managed Isolation. During our second week of Managed Isolation I started researching in earnest, then we viewed a few on the day after release, quickly confirmed our priorities, and selected a rental company with a number of ex-rentals at fire-sale prices. Buying a van from a company that’s been mothballed because of lack of business was surprisingly difficult – what should have taken two days took two weeks, with every step involving a wait of several days. In the end I feel like I sold the van to myself. But, the product and the price were right, so I gritted my teeth through the shitty customer service and Cyril became ours.

Cyril is my middle name. As a kid I absolutely hated the name, finding it too old fashioned. When I was about 13 I started a part time job and needed a bank account for the first time, and was embarrassed at the bank by not being sure how to spell it! As I grew older I came to like the uniqueness of it, and respect the memory of my grandfather who I indeed took the name from.

One of the promised-but-not-done jobs was removing the old rental logo, so we did this this on a nice sunny afternoon a few days into our first trip.

The reality is that the two week delay wasn’t significant. One thing we’re not short on these days is time, and I got to spend some good time with my sister’s family and mum. It was more about being impatient to be finally allowed into NZ after what seemed like a long and often stressful process, and being eager to get out and explore.

We see a lot of similarities between Cyril and Aroha. Both are self-contained, and after a couple of minor modifications involving improved house batteries and the addition of solar panels, we’ll be able to easily live off grid for a week or so at a time.

We often joke about our transition to a simpler, smaller way of life. In Dubai we moved from a huge five bedroom villa to a series of smaller apartments, then onboard Aroha, now a camper van. Our last apartment was about 70m², Aroha about 26m², and I’ve just got the tape measure out and calculated that Cyril gives us a whopping 8.2m² of living space! Whilst we expect that we’ll be spending much more time outside exploring nature, I hope there’s no further downsizing to our living space after this!