Recommended Reading Material for YOUR Trip to New Zealand

We found a few books to be extremely helpful on our tour of New Zealand, and we thought we would share the titles, as well as links to the books at Amazon.com, with our readers.

Driving Scenic New Zealand: A Guide to Touring New Zealand by Road
This was literally our driving bible during our entire trip. Great scenic driving route ideas, as well as the occasional helpful restaurant and cafe recommendation too.

Slipping into Paradise: Why I Live in New Zealand by Jeffrey Masson
An engaging, if narcissistic, book by a former Californian who chucked his competitive American life out the window and moved to New Zealand. Gives a readable overview on New Zealand history, Maori culture, and other key issues facing the country.

DK Eyewitness Travel Guides New Zealand
This book, like all DK travel guides, is crammed with a dizzying amount of information. In fact, there's so much information that it's almost too intimidating to use. We recommend starting just with the introductory chapters--then arbitrarily choose just one or two other chapters that interest you. We also found this book useful as an after-the-fact reference guide to help us remember details and placenames. Also contains a great list of books for further reading.

For what it's worth, we never bothered with Frommer's, Fodor's, Let's Go or Lonely Planet Guides for New Zealand. If anyone out there found those guidebooks particularly useful, please let us know in the comments section!

Finally, for anyone even remotely interested in birding, Laura would recommend bringing along a handy field guide to New Zealand birds (consider The Reed Field Guide or Heather and Robertson's Guide to the Birds of New Zealand, both of which are highly regarded). There are a ton of fascinating--even weird--birds in this country, and I think if we had it to do over again, we would have educated ourselves more on this subject before we arrived.