Firstly, the new rule was bought about to bring us inline with how most other countries around the world operate with regard to giving way. That means that the news rules should be more intuitive (though you should have a thorough understanding of New Zealand road rules prior to driving). NZTA figures show there are more than 16,000 crashes at intersections each year, which equates to over 300 a week, or 45 a day. Many tourists have mentioned that there is quite a bit of confusion around the giving way to the right rule, so the rule has now been changed.

There’s a couple of areas of the rule you need to know.

The left-turn versus right-turn give way rule has changed

Check out the video and photos below!

The give way rule for uncontrolled T-intersections has changed

Check out these examples below!

In addition to toilets, we’ve also added an exit button so the GPS functionality doesn’t chew up too much of your battery life when you’re not running CamperMate.

You may also notice we’ve removed the ‘breakfast’ icon from the main menu. When we launched we drove around the country cooking free breakfasts for tourists and displayed where we were parking up on the app. When we finished the trip this function was  longer relevant so away it went!

We’ve also done a little work to make the app interface a little more friendlier..

We hope you enjoy it!

The breakfasts have been a great way to talk directly with tourists and get amazing insight into the problems they are facing when travelling around this beautiful country. This insight will be bought into the ongoing development of the CamperMate project.

Once we reached Auckland we cooked a breaky at the Westhaven Marina (Temporary Motorhome Park for the Rugby World Cup) which went down a treat (thanks to Gavin for the help!) before heading up to the Overnight Cruise ‘Rock the Boat’-an awesome way to check out the Bay of Islands.

We headed back to Auckland for a bit of a TV appearance on the Breakfast show which was fitting. In terms of weather, it’s been pretty good aside from wind experienced in Dunedin and Coromandel, however today it was pouring down. Luckily it cleared enough to setup one of the trusty BBQ’s for a cookup in front of the cameras! We had an awesome breaky ourselves at Dennys across the road from the TVNZ studios-guess what we chose-Bacon and Eggs!

We’ve met some great people on this trip it’s been awesome! Special thanks to YHA, Beehive Bacon, i-SITE, ‘Rock the Boat’ and all those individuals of which there are too many to thank but you know who you are!

Thanks a bunch-Keep up to date with CamperMates progress on Twitter or Facebook!

Adam and Simon

I hate waiting for food at the best of times so the delay was making us both pretty nervous! We learnt this lesson however from Dunedin so we bought some plastic wrapping to keep the wind off and this worked a charm.

We served around 60 people, before checking out a local cafe for a coffee. Coromandel is a nice chilled out wee town, I imagine mid summer it would be run off its feet. After an hour or so we checked out the Coromandel Smoking Company that smokes seafood, it was awesome. Munching on some mussels, we stopped off in Thames for some lunch before making our way to Auckland. We got onto the motorway and before long we were at a snails pace-5pm Friday on the Auckland Motorway is not a nice place to be! After a few hours we made it to the Auckland YHA where we finally put up our feet (and are currently writing this). Tomorrow we have one of our last breakfasts at the Westhaven Marina where we will no doubt see many people from the Dunedin and Queenstown breakies, as the England/Scotland game is on here tomorrow night.

However, the next day we woke around 6 to find it another stunner of a day-we have been extremely lucky with the weather so far. We first had to drive 10 mins out of town to collect the supply of Beehive Streaky bacon that would be served. Seeing the traffic backed up in the other lane meant things would be a little slow on the trip back into the CBD.

We setup at around 8.30 outside the awesome Wellington i-SITE in Civic Square, a great location right in the middle of town. Within minutes of the bacon cooking the smell had pervaded every nook and cranny in the CBD and soon enough we had private and public sector workers lining up, along with tourists.

 Both Simon and I were on hyper mode as we cracked eggs, fried up bacon, buttered bread and even managed to get a few snaps!

2 hours flew by and before we knew it we had to call it a day, pack up the van and head to Taupo YHA where we had booked an awesome room. Both smelling of bacon, we jumped in the van and headed for a few locations to film (Beehive, Cable car) before getting on the road.

Driving the Desert Road is a personal favourite, it’s a part of the country that has a real ominous feeling about it-especially at sunset and few vehicles around. Awesome drive! We arrived into Taupo around 8.30 and put our feet up, ready for the breaky at the Taupo i-SITE in the morning!

Waking to the sun streaming through your window in Kaikoura is a great feeling. Unfortunately we couldn’t hang around to experience it as we had a late breakfast planned for Picton, a ferry check-in time of 1, and the drive was to take about 2 hours or so. We arrived into Picton, grabbed some supplies from the supermarket, found a dunny for Simon (for the Dunny Challenge) and headed down to the Picton i-SITE where we started preparing.

Within minutes of frying up the awesome Beehive bacon, we had our first customers who couldn’t quite believe the breakfast (or brunch by this stage) was completely free.  We had around 70 eager tourists come through (and a few local workers) before packing up and just making our ferry. I’m used to reception cutting out on the ferry crossing, but I had coverage for near all of the journey, awesome! Arrived into Wellington stressing about the possible wind, which could reak havoc on the BBQs ability to heat the hot plate. Booked into the Wellington YHA which was an awesome place to rest the feet up after a fairly long day. Checked the weather forecast before going to bed, ‘northerly winds expected’…

When we arrived at the Dunedin Holiday Park, we were confronted with a coastal wind that wasn’t making life pleasant for a Sunday morning. We soon discovered that our BBQ’s were taking a direct hit from the wind and this reduced the temperature of the hotplate! With a queue already forming and two extremely tired eggs, we decided to move into a sheltered area (with the help of the staff and a few helpful campers). This proved to be the saviour and soon enough we were back on the tools-frying up a storm!

We cooked up for a few hours, cleaned up and hit the road. Not before checking out a bit of Dunedin. First we went for a bit of a cruise along the coast, had a look at the new stadium and took the CamperMate van up the words steepest street (Baldwin Street). We pushed onto Christchurch on a day that gave us snow, strong winds and beautiful clear skies..New Zealand really can have four seasons in one day!