New Zealand is among the most well-known trekking regions in the world, emphasized by The Lord of the Rings Trilogies. Among the treks, or tramps as the kiwi’s call it, are 10 great walks. However, such notoriety draws tremendous number of visitors and subsequently makes a trip to New Zealand difficult to plan and expensive to undertake. This is especially the case during a major holiday season like the time Christmas and New Years. Housing, either paid or award airline tickets, transportation, and permits for the great walks are many of the obstacles that needs to be planned, and extremely meticulous so in order to keep costs down.

Because of the length and complication of our trip, this trip report is broken up into several entries and taking me a while to write. Learning to work with Lightroom also has made the process a little longer.