About winding roads and travel sickness

Travelling New Zealand is not as easy as you might think - at least when you tend to suffer from travel sickness. The country is covered by thousands of extraordinarily winding roads which represent a nightmare for many people with a sensitive stomach. Surprisingly, some of those killer roads are even called highways - in Germany, you would probably only refer to them as gravel roads.

So, one of the worst things that can happen to you is passing those roads with an unexperienced or simply bad driver. We once happened to travel a so called highway on the beautiful Coromandel peninsula with a 18 year old girl who had just got her licence and who was slightly overcharged with the particularly narrow and winding road - completely understandable I have to admit. We were all lucky that we got alive even though, after we had mastered the critical passage, everyone except for the driver had to immediately jump out of the car and lie motionless on the ground for several minutes in order not to vomit. Funnily enough, our WWOOFing host at that point told us afterwards that that “highway” was part of a racing track and that he, a hobby rallye driver, used to go along that road with a speed of more than 100kph whereas we were not able to imagine going any faster than 20kph without risking to head for the scrub.

So basically, if you are likely to get travel sick in cars or busses, you’re fucked. There aren’t a lot of alternatives since the railwork network is fairly limited (consisting of only four main lines).

Yet, there is one suprisingly cheap option for long distance travels: taking the plane. You can get a flight from the North to the South Island for about 50 euros only. Unfortunately, as you have to fly over Cook Strait, considered one of the most dangerous and unpredictable waters in the world, you should also prepare yourself for a bumpy ride.

However, wouldn’t you say these scenic routes are not worth feeling a little sick in exchange?