All you need to know about New Zealand – The good, the bad, and the ugly

New Zealand is ridiculously easy to fall in love with. I know because I did. I lived there for several years, travelled all over both islands, and for a long time genuinely thought I might never leave.

But New Zealand also gets romanticized to death. Behind the mountains, ridiculously blue lakes and laid-back Kiwi lifestyle are a few realities that don’t make it onto the tourism posters; some mildly annoying, others genuinely surprising.

So rather than give you another list of reasons why New Zealand is amazing, I want to give you the version I wish more people talked about: what New Zealand is really like, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

These are the pros and cons I noticed after actually living and travelling there, not just visiting for two weeks.

And despite everything in the bad and ugly sections? I’d still recommend New Zealand in a heartbeat.

What and where is New Zealand?

New Zealand is a stunning island nation located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, approximately 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) southeast of Australia.

New Zealand consists of two big main islands, aptly named the North Island and the South Island (you’ll find that New Zealand isn’t great at coming up with original names for places and roads), and about 600 smaller islands.

New Zealand is renowned for its diverse and breathtaking landscapes, ranging from lush rainforests and rugged mountains to serene beaches, otherworldly geothermal landscapes and vibrant cities.

If you’re wondering what New Zealand is known for, the scenery is the obvious answer, but Māori culture, adventurous outdoor activities and unique wildlife are a huge part of it too.

How big is New Zealand and how many people live there?

The size of New Zealand is comparable to that of the United Kingdom, but with an estimated New Zealand population of about 5.36 million people, the country isn’t densely populated at all.

Of those, around 1.8 million live in the Auckland Region, which gives you some idea of how empty the rest of the country can feel.

When you venture outside of the bigger cities you can often drive for hours without seeing another human being, but while the country isn’t crowded at all, it still received 3.67 million international visitors in the year to June 2026.

Most of these tourists come to admire the country’s natural splendor and hit more or less the same hotspots, so depending on the season certain popular locations can get really, really busy.

How to visit New Zealand?

If you’d like to explore New Zealand in an authentic way, visit the hotspots that are actually worth the buzz while also making time to enjoy some of the hidden gems, I recommend you check out my North Island and South Island road trip itineraries. They both come in 2 and 3 week versions.

For most of these routes, having your own wheels makes life dramatically easier. I’m very biased toward campervans — I traveled around New Zealand in one for about a year — but a rental car plus hotels is usually more comfortable.

If you’re on limited time, then these shorter itineraries are for you, with the perfect way to spend a week on the North Island and 10 days on the South Island.

Either way, don’t underestimate New Zealand driving times; the roads are often narrow, winding and much slower than the map makes them look. Compare rental cars here, or read my New Zealand car rental guide first.

If you’re planning…	Start here
A longer North Island road trip	North Island 2 & 3 week road trip
One week on the North Island	7-day North Island itinerary
A longer South Island road trip	South Island 2 & 3 week road trip
A shorter South Island trip	10-day South Island itinerary

Book the Big New Zealand Experiences in Advance

You do not need to pre-book every stop on a New Zealand road trip, but I would not leave the expensive, capacity-limited experiences until the day before.

• Milford Sound: I’d book this small-boat Milford Sound cruise if you’re driving yourself to the fiord.
• Franz Josef: The Franz Josef Glacier heli-hike is expensive, weather-dependent and one of the few West Coast splurges I genuinely think is worth building the itinerary around.
• Rotorua: I’d prioritize the Te Pā Tū Māori cultural evening if you want the full cultural experience and hāngī dinner.
• Hobbiton: Reserve the Hobbiton Movie Set tour before your road-trip dates are locked around Matamata.
• Kaikōura: Book the Kaikōura whale-watching cruise if wildlife is a priority rather than hoping the departure you want still has space.

The good

New Zealand’s scenery is breathtaking

New Zealand might be the most scenic country in the world, with so much diversity that you find a different breathtaking view around almost every corner.

In the middle of the North Island there is the active Taupō volcanic system, with the 616-square-kilometer (238-square-mile) Lake Taupō filling its caldera, and the stunning Tongariro Crossing hike and Mt. Doom at its feet. Nearby Rotorua still remains geothermally active to this day.

You might have heard about the almost symmetrical Taranaki Maunga, visible from hundreds of kilometers in any direction, standing proud in the middle of its own peninsula. Or you might have seen photos of the breathtaking Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel Peninsula.

Then, in the middle of the South Island stands the impressive Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain with the unbelievably blue Lake Pukaki at its foot. This is one of my favorite areas but weather can be a bit tricky sometimes.

Milford Sound is often dubbed as the 8th wonder of the world and you won’t believe its beauty until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. I’ve returned here more times than I can count and it always leaves me speacheles.

Close to Queenstown and Glenorchy there is a place that is literally called Paradise. These are just some of the incredible locations in the land that Peter Jackson used to bring the Lord of the Rings books to life. And Queenstown is the place I’ve been fortunate enough to call home.

New Zealand is an incredibly beautiful country and a great place to live and travel to. From gorgeous sandy beaches to rugged coastal cliffs, from wide open green plains to volcanoes and massive snow-capped mountain ranges full of glacial lakes, from dense rainforests to rolling hills and impressive waterfalls, New Zealand’s got it all!

The wildlife in New Zealand is incredible

Then there is the wildlife, which is just as impressive as the scenery. New Zealand is home to many amazing and rare bird and marine wildlife species.

I know, bird watching doesn’t sound exciting and I thought the same thing when I came to New Zealand, but that quickly changes when you see massive royal albatrosses sweep over your head, or when you see the extremely cute little blue penguin hop out of the water and waddle to its nest. The list of rare bird species just goes on and on, and then there are of course the famous kiwi birds. They do exist, I’ve seen them!

The marine wildlife is something you’ll definitely get excited for. New Zealand is one of the best countries in the world to see wild dolphins, and there are many species to see too. There’s the Hector’s dolphin, which is the rarest and smallest dolphin in the world, orcas, bottlenose dolphins, and in Kaikoura you can see superpods of up to a thousand dusky dolphins at a time!

There are also loads of seals, often with adorable little pups, and sea lions. New Zealand is also home to stingrays and great white sharks, hammerhead sharks and other shark species.

Depending on the season, you can see sperm whales, humpback whales, and if you’re lucky even humongous blue whales. If whales are high on your list, this Kaikōura whale-watching cruise is the one I’d book ahead.

The only downside is that New Zealand’s waters are very cold, so most of the time you can forget about jumping in without a proper wetsuit.

There are no dangerous animals in New Zealand

You’re probably thinking “but didn’t you say that there are sharks in the water, they are super dangerous!” Yes, there are sharks in New Zealand’s waters, but you’re more likely to get injured by a sheep than to get attacked by a shark, so unless you’re bleeding and decide to jump in the water with a big, hungry shark, you shouldn’t worry about that either.

And no, New Zealand doesn’t have native land snakes. Sea snakes and kraits do occasionally drift into New Zealand waters on currents, but they don’t establish breeding populations here and there is no recorded case of anyone being bitten by one in New Zealand.

In my opinion, the most hazardous animal that you can encounter on land is a swarm of sandflies. They are extremely annoying and their bites itch like hell, but they’re in no way dangerous.

The people in New Zealand are extremely friendly

Kiwis, as New Zealanders call themselves, live in a multicultural country, and Māori culture has a huge influence on New Zealand’s national identity.

Māori are tangata whenua, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand and descendants of Polynesian voyagers who settled the islands centuries before Europeans. British colonization followed the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.

Māori influence is visible in everything from place names and language to everyday culture. One concept you’ll hear about is manaakitanga, which loosely translates into hospitality, care and respect for others.

People in New Zealand will greet you on the street, are sincerely interested in how you are, and they love hearing about your travel plans and will likely give you some additional travel recommendations too. And when you see a police car rolling up this doesn’t necessarily mean trouble, as police officers often just stop for a chat and a laugh.

New Zealand has a great work-life balance

One of the things I loved most about living in New Zealand was the work-life balance. This doesn’t mean that people here don’t work hard, quite the opposite actually, but finding the right balance is at least as important.

The great work-life balance in New Zealand is aided by many employers allowing for flexible working conditions. Often you’re allowed flexible start and finish times, or you get certain deliverables in a week, and once those are met, you’re allowed extra time off.

This way I often went kitesurfing during my lunch break. Some companies have even introduced four-day workweeks and found that both productivity and work satisfaction among their employees increased.

What also helps is that Kiwis have a high standard of living and are usually very active in their free time. They meet up with friends for barbeques, practice sports or go for trips in nature. You’re not a true kiwi if you don’t go camping, love hiking or at least own a jetski.

New Zealand is very safe

Is New Zealand safe? Yes — about as safe as it gets. New Zealand ranked second in the world in the 2026 Global Peace Index, behind only Iceland. Crime obviously still exists, but for travelers the overall risk is low.

If you apply basic safety precautions like hiding your valuables, keeping some spare money in a safe place and letting people you trust know where you’re going, as well as using your common sense, you have very little to worry about.

New Zealand caters really well to travelers

New Zealand recognizes that tourism brings in a big chunk of the country’s yearly income and therefore tries to make traveling the country as easy as possible. There are fantastic facilities available, parking at many attractions is free and everything is really well signposted.

Campervans really are one of the best ways to explore New Zealand and you’ll find it very easy to travel this way. For starters, DOC operates more than 320 campsites around the country, and there are picnic areas, public toilets and basic traveler facilities all over the place.

Freedom camping does come with more rules than it used to. From June 7, 2026, vehicles need the new green self-containment warrant to camp in areas restricted to certified self-contained vehicles, and portable toilets no longer qualify. Local councils also have their own restricted and prohibited areas, so don’t assume you can just park anywhere pretty and call it home.

New Zealand also has a very streamlined administrative system and isn’t very bureaucratic, so it is relatively easy to arrange stuff like a Working Holiday Visa, tax number and bank account. To make things even better, ACC, New Zealand’s no-fault accident scheme, also covers visitors for qualifying accidental injuries that happen in New Zealand.

That does not replace travel insurance. ACC does not cover things like illness, disrupted travel plans or emergency transport home, so I’d still travel with proper insurance.

Sorting your road trip?

Compare New Zealand rental cars
I’d book your car once the route and airports are fixed, especially for summer, school holidays and one-way South Island rentals.

New Zealand is very remote

New Zealand is one of the most geographically isolated countries in the world. While this can be seen as a bad thing, for now I consider it a good thing.

That isolation is part of what makes New Zealand feel so different. Once you leave the main cities, you can get surprisingly far from crowds, traffic and general chaos, and there are still places that feel properly wild rather than landscaped for tourists.

I still joke that New Zealand is the perfect place to survive the apocalypse. It’s just far enough away that no one will bother attacking it, and isolated enough that you’d at least have a decent head start.

The bad

Based on everything I’ve told you so far, New Zealand sounds like the best country in the world, right? While New Zealand is a great country, there are some aspects that are less than ideal.

The UV in New Zealand is brutal

There isn’t literally an ozone hole sitting above New Zealand, but the UV really is brutal.

Peak UV levels in New Zealand are roughly 40% higher than at comparable latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. That comes from a combination of lower ozone levels, the Earth being closer to the sun during the Southern Hemisphere summer and New Zealand’s relatively clean air.

The lack of protection means that the sun’s UV rays can cause sunburn and other skin damage incredibly quickly.

This all means that even if it isn’t warm outside, and even on gloomy overcast days, you should still wear sun protection because otherwise you can get sunburned in no time.

New Zealand has lots of seismic activity

New Zealand lies smack on top of the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. Their movement causes a lot of seismic and volcanic activity.

GeoNet locates around 20,000 earthquakes in and around New Zealand every year. Most are tiny, but roughly 250 are big enough to be felt, and some can cause massive amounts of damage.

You probably heard about the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 that took 185 lives and caused insane amounts of damage to the city. Having lived in Christchurch myself, the legacy of the earthquakes is impossible to separate from the modern city; the rebuild reshaped huge parts of the center.

In 2016, an even stronger earthquake happened near Kaikoura. This earthquake lifted parts of the coastline by almost 6 meters (20 feet) and destroyed big parts of the main north-south highway, forcing traffic to take a detour for several years until the highway was repaired.

There are active volcanoes in New Zealand

GeoNet currently monitors 12 volcanoes and volcanic areas across New Zealand, including the Auckland Volcanic Field, Taupō, Ruapehu, Taranaki Maunga and Whakaari/White Island. Volcanoes like Mount Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings) look awesome, and the geothermal hot springs around Rotorua and Taupō are a lot of fun, but they are not without danger.

New Zealand’s volcanoes don’t erupt that frequently, but eruptions can be abrupt and violent.

On December 9, 2019, Whakaari/White Island erupted while 47 people were on the island. Twenty-two people ultimately died, and many of the survivors suffered severe injuries.

I already mentioned the incredibly big Taupō supervolcano. It last erupted more than 1,800 years ago, and GeoNet describes that eruption as the most violent eruption in the world in the last 5,000 years. So yes, Lake Taupō is part of an active volcanic system — but it’s not something I’d lose sleep over while planning a trip.

If the geothermal side of New Zealand is what interests you most, read my Rotorua geothermal parks comparison. If you also want the cultural side, I’d combine it with the Te Pā Tū Māori cultural evening.

New Zealand is expensive

Is New Zealand expensive? Unfortunately, yes. Even though wages in New Zealand are relatively high, it is still an expensive country to live and travel in. Especially the prices of food, alcohol, fuel and accommodation can be painfully high.

You’d think that real estate prices would be reasonable with such a low population density, but they are actually through the roof (pun intended). Even though it seems that there is a lot of empty land in New Zealand, most of the land is actually either part of national parks or privately owned, leaving very little land to build on.

This helps keep land and housing expensive, especially around the major cities and the places everybody actually wants to live. The housing market is more complicated than one neat explanation, but the end result for residents is fairly simple: property is not cheap.

The housing quality in New Zealand is poor

As if the high real estate prices weren’t bad enough, the quality of houses in New Zealand also isn’t exactly up to the standards I was used to in Europe, especially when it comes to older homes.

One of the things that genuinely surprised me when I first lived in New Zealand was how cold some houses could feel in winter. Older housing stock has a long-standing reputation for insufficient insulation, dampness and patchy heating.

Things have improved. From July 1, 2025, all rental properties are required to comply with the Healthy Homes standards, covering heating, insulation, ventilation, moisture and drainage, and draught stopping.

That doesn’t mean every Kiwi house suddenly feels like a Scandinavian sauna. Whole-house central heating is still much less common than in much of Europe, and heat pumps are everywhere. They’re great at heating the room they’re actually in; the chilly hallway and bedroom at the other end of the house may have other ideas.

Rural mobile coverage can still be patchy

The internet in New Zealand is no longer the horror show it was when I first lived there. Fibre in the cities and larger towns is generally perfectly good.

The problem is mobile coverage once you head into rural and remote New Zealand. On road trips through places like the West Coast and Fiordland you can still hit stretches with weak or no reception, so I always download offline maps before a long drive.

Rural connectivity is improving, and satellite internet has changed the equation considerably, but geography is still geography.

But hey, at least you can use a digital detox as the perfect excuse for a New Zealand road trip!

New Zealand is very remote

Wait, didn’t I already list this as a good thing? Yes I did, but I also mentioned that it can be seen as a bad thing.

Because New Zealand is so remote, it is very isolated. The closest sovereign country to New Zealand is Australia, but even the major cities are separated by more than 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) of Tasman Sea. Getting anywhere international involves a proper flight.

Not only does it take ages to get to another country, because the distances are so big it can also cost a small fortune. If you’re not originally from New Zealand this can lead to feelings of loneliness, isolation and homesickness.

New Zealand’s remoteness also adds to the country being so expensive. It has a relatively small domestic market and a lot of goods have to travel a very long way to reach it. Freight, logistics and limited competition can all show up rather painfully in the final price.

The ugly

I’ve spent several years in New Zealand and have come to know its uglier traits too. While I’m not trying to put New Zealand into a bad light, I do feel that it is important to mention these things to give you a better idea of what goes on in the country. I still love it despite all this!

Alcohol abuse is a serious issue in New Zealand

There is a big drinking culture in New Zealand. According to the latest New Zealand Health Survey, 74.9% of adults drank alcohol in the previous 12 months, and 16.6% were classified as hazardous drinkers in 2024/25.

There is some good news: hazardous drinking is down from 21.3% in 2019/20. But one in six adults still isn’t exactly a rounding error.

The negative impact of alcohol on individual health is already bad enough, but it also contributes to accidents, injuries, mental-health problems and harm in communities.

New Zealand has spent years trying to tackle this with drink-driving enforcement, alcohol-free public areas and restrictions around serving intoxicated customers. The culture is changing, but alcohol harm is still a very real issue.

Mental health is a serious issue in New Zealand

New Zealand’s scenery, outdoor lifestyle and generally laid-back image make this one particularly easy to miss.

In the 2024/25 New Zealand Health Survey, 14.3% of adults experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress in the previous four weeks, almost double the 7.4% recorded in 2019/20. Among people aged 15–24, that figure was 22.9%.

One thing I noticed while living there is a fairly strong tough it out streak in Kiwi culture — the whole I’m a Kiwi, I’m tough attitude. That’s my personal observation rather than an explanation for the statistics, but it does sit in strange contrast with the carefree image people often have of New Zealand.

New Zealand is not as eco-friendly as you might think

You might find this strange to read because New Zealand is such a green and beautiful country. It protects enormous areas of spectacular wilderness, but green scenery doesn’t automatically mean a pristine environment.

Freshwater is one of the clearest examples. Current national reporting estimates that 44% of New Zealand’s total river length was unsuitable for activities like swimming between 2020 and 2024, based on modeled bacterial risk.

Agriculture is an important pressure on freshwater quality, alongside urban development, forestry, wastewater and other forms of land use. Depending on the catchment, excess nutrients, sediment and pathogens can all end up in waterways.

That contradiction is worth knowing about. New Zealand markets itself on nature — and for very good reason — but it also has serious environmental problems to solve.

Is New Zealand worth visiting?

Yes, yes, and a thousand times more yes. When you add all the pros and cons, New Zealand comes out on top by a mile! It is an incredible country and if it wasn’t so far away from everything else I would probably still be living there.

The scenery and wildlife are incredible, unique and something you really have to see for yourself. I’m sure that a trip to New Zealand will be the experience of a lifetime.

And again, follow my South Island and North Island itineraries for the best possible experience of all the best New Zealand has to offer!

If you still have any questions or doubts, don’t be shy and let me know in the comments!

Planning a trip to New Zealand?

New Zealand looks small on a map. It is not small in road-trip terms. I lived there for years and traveled the country extensively, and one of the easiest mistakes to make is trying to squeeze far too much into too little time.

Start with the itinerary that matches your route, then use my destination and accommodation guides to fill in the details. I’ve grouped the most useful New Zealand guides below so you don’t have to go digging through the whole site.

Keep it handy and pin this to your travel inspo board