Our last photo of the week in New Zealand has to be one of our home for most of the time that we've been here. (Not a particularly good photo but the only one we have. Taken at the motorhome park in Wellington.)

A camper van is a great way to travel around these islands and a very popular one too. At times it seemed as if every second vehicle on the road was a camper van - especially on South Island.

Camper vans come in three classes. There are the bigger and better equipped ones - mostly from a company called Maui. Their great advantage is that you don't have to take the bed apart every day to make room to sit and eat and they generally take four people. But that comes with a significant price ticket. Then there are ones like ours from companies such as United, Britz and Pacific Horizon. They comfortably take two people and have perfectly adequate cooking facilities, a toilet (very useful at 3 o'clock in the morning) and a shower. Finally there are the smaller ones with no toilet and where you often have to stand outside to cook. These are obviously targeted at young people on a tight budget as the rental companies have 'cool' names such as 'Juicy', 'Spaceships' and 'Happy Campers' and come in bright orange or green (other camper vans are uniformly white).

Whatever class you're in they all have the benefit of giving you great flexibility. Well equipped campsites abound and it's perfectly possible in many areas to 'freedom camp', as Kiwis call it, i.e. pull off the side of the road and stop overnight.

Of course there is a downside to everything. And apart from having to make the bed (literally - in our van that involved taking the table top off and using it as the bed base) the biggest drawback for us was having to put everything away all the time - and then, and this was the difficult bit, remember where we'd put it. We've spent a fair bit of time over the last few weeks looking for things. It's surprising how difficult this can be in a what you'd imagine is a small space with limited possibilities for storage.

But that aside we've enjoyed it immensely. We've driven over 3,300 miles and stopped in some wonderful places - especially campsites that are right next to fantastic beaches or in the heart of the mountains. When we get back home we're definitely going to be heading up to Duns to visit the camper van shop!