Name: New Zealand Road Trip | Van Life Lake Rotorua to Taupo
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T19:06:22.000Z
Duration: 13 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome back to the channel. I'm Alex, a.k.a. Alex the Vagabond.

I just woke up. I had a coffee, hence the reason that I'm speaking at a million miles a minute.

But it's like day four for us in New Zealand. We took a little bit of a vacation for a few days.

I know that's kind of ironic seeing as how we're travel vloggers.

She's eating pretzels for breakfast because it's van life.

This is our first morning after our first evening of vanlifing, and I'm feeling pretty good.

This will be our home for the next two weeks.

This is our couch area slash sleeping area slash living area.

We can eat here. I actually quite love this.

You can have dinner like this across from each other, and then you could just put it back and use it as a side table if you'd like.

It's also removable, so you can unscrew it there, put it on the ground.

The wood plank here folds back, and then you remove these pillows, and you create a little bed situation.

There's dirty water, gray water, I think they call it.

This is how you pump the water. It's not easy.

We've got some utensils and such, some dishwashing stuff.

We're going to be driving this thing essentially from Auckland all the way down to Christchurch.

We're going to take the ferry across from Wellington to Picton a little bit later in the journey.

But today the goal is leave Rotorua and make our way to Lake Taupo.

We're going to do a little bit of fly fishing, and then the day after tomorrow in the next video, we're going to be doing the Tongariro Crossing.

Join us. Stick around. It's going to be fun.

I think on that note, it's time to get the hell out of here.

This is probably one of the most touristy places on the North Island.

It's also nicknamed the Sulphur City because it's essentially

New Zealand's most geothermally active location.

There's a huge sulfur vent over there that leaks into the lake, creates this really beautiful effect.

But it does make the whole city smell a little bit like rotten eggs.

But that being said, it's still a beautiful place to visit.

If you're into mountain biking, this is one of the best places to do that in New Zealand.

But over the years, it has become a little bit popular with tourists.

The Maori revered Rotorua's geothermal waters.

They actually called it Wai-o-Tapu, or sacred waters.

There are many places to bathe if you're into hot springs.

Unfortunately, we're not going to have too much time hanging out here.

But if you do come to Rotorua, it's definitely worth stopping in, checking out.

We're going to be hopping in the car and riding down to Taupo.

I'd have to go back at it around the other way.

This is totally not a four-wheel-drive car.

Now they've called in the reinforcements.

That's what should have happened in the first place.

I did not expect to have such a little adventure just to make a left turn a couple hundred meters away to park in the lot for the fishing.

The lake is just over on the other side of the road from us.

Lake Taupo has tons of different rivers and streams that feeds into it.

It's one of the largest lakes in New Zealand, and it's the largest lake in the

We're surrounded by this beautiful forest.

We've got native bush, so we can hike up footpaths along the river, and there's plenty of really good fly fishing.

We're going to set up our rods and throw on some waders and then take a little hike up the river, and catch a few fish.

We have managed to get all switched over.

We're here in the beginning of March, but we're kind of having a little bit of a heat wave here.

Super fun being able to share this with Carrie.

She's also an avid fly fisher, but has never fished in New Zealand.

It's really nice because it's super still right now.

And in New Zealand, it's usually quite windy, so we're really lucky right now.

We just have to be super quiet because I guess this water here is really, really, really clear, so we have to go in still.

One thing about fly fishing is there are a lot of little tedious tasks to get to the good part of the day, which is actually fishing.

But there's a lot of little things you have to do to get there.

Like Carrie said, fly fishing can be kind of a pain in the butt because there's a lot of steps.

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New Zealand Road Trip | Van Life Lake Rotorua to Taupo

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