Steve Courtenay
North Island ▷ Ruapehu ▷ Ohakune ▷
4.5/5
A great camp!
Lovely ablution blocks with awesome hot and powerful showers which have heated towel rails, heat lamps and something sadly lacking in most camps, tons of hooks to hang your clothes etc up on whilst you shower. Beautiful kitchen and the laundry and drying room is great also. Plenty for the kids to do in the camp and when they get bored of the play area and jumping pillow, it’s only a short stroll to the middle of Ohakune for an ice cream.
South Island ▷ Canterbury ▷ Rangiora ▷
3.0/5
A nice camp, But it could be a great camp...
with a few improvements which the Council (or park managers) should have thought about when they built it after the Christchurch earthquakes - for instance; There is NOWHERE to hang your towel when having a wash in the ablusion block, nor is there anywhere to to even put your toilet bag when having a wash or cleaning your teeth, except on the floor!
The showers are great, hot (too hot in the middle of summer - you cannot have a 'tepid' shower) and free, except that you only get about 6 minutes before you have to open the shower door (naked!) and push the 'hot water' button again. It must cost them a fortune in cleaning as every time you have to get out of the shower to push the hot water button the floor gets soaked with water (and soap). If they gave their customers another couple of minutes to enable them to wash their hair etc then they would have drier floors and less cleaning up by their frustrated cleaner!
Add another dollar onto the nightly camp fee and give your customers a decent shower!!
The kitchen is very small and there is nowhere to eat, unless you do so outside in the very nice grassed areas that have a couple of lovely tables to eat on. This is really nice when the summer temperatures are in the mid to late 20's but most would struggle when the temps were in single figures!
The laundry is also great - except there are no clotheslines to hang your washing out on! (unless you walk several hundred metres to the 'old' part of the campsite where there is a couple of old 'whirlygig' clotheslines.
If you have a caravan or campervan, the nearest (and only) dump station is again, a very long walk down to the 'old' part of the campsite. Why on earth didn't they put a bit more thought into designing this campsite. With the amount of tourists now coming into NZ and hiring campervans there is no way that a really good, well thought out, customer friendly campground is going to make a loss on investment.