New Zealand trucking

Traffic around Auckland is horrific, and to be avoided unless you enjoy sitting in jams. Tauranga is getting bad too. The rest of the country is fairly ‘normal’. Most of the population is on North Island, so South Island is the place to go for unspoilt miles upon miles of open roads, rolling hills, sheep and cattle country mostly, and spectacular mountains, lakes, glacial rivers etc.

North Island is probably easier to find a job, though, as there is obviously more demand here. If you’re lucky you might land a job doing inter-island work on the ferries and get to see the best of both islands. However, that does mean a lot of time away from home.

Everything in NZ is scaled to about one twelfth of what you have in the UK, reflecting the population difference. There are no RDCs with hundreds of bays - in fact docking bays are quite uncommon. Most places will have canopies and forklifts for loading/unloading via side curtains. The majority of trucks - the truck & trailer outfits - don’t even have rear doors. They’re a handful to reverse too, as they have both the ringfeeder and the dolly pivot points. Semi-trailers are in the minority.

If you choose a city with a port then you can probably find plenty of jobs running containers - swinglift or skelly. Tauranga, Auckland and Christchurch are probably the big three, but there’s also Timaru, Dunedin, Napier, New Plymouth and others.

NZ is predominantly an agricultural economy so much of the work will be seasonal, with peaks and troughs through the year. Time your approach for maximum demand (harvest time, fruit picking season, avocados and kiwifruit centred on the Te Puke area near Tauranga).