Gisborne’s compensation for being far from everything is that what it has, it has almost to itself. Surf ten minutes from the hospital, native forest inland, and one of the great road trips in New Zealand starting at the edge of town.
Driving times from the city, to scale against each other. The marked row is the reason a meaningful number of clinicians move here at all: surf inside twenty minutes, and uncrowded.
Beyond the chart sit the region’s two great expeditions: Te Urewera and Lake Waikaremoana to the west, and State Highway 35 right around the Cape — expeditions, not day trips.
The surf
This is the main event. Wainui, Makorori and the beaches north of the city catch swell from the whole eastern Pacific, and they are consistent, varied and — the part people cannot quite believe — uncrowded. Ten to twenty minutes from your front door.
Add Māhia to the south for longer point breaks, and the city beaches at Waikanae and Midway for a swim after work. There are surf schools, boardriders clubs and a strong local culture around it. A meaningful number of the clinicians who move here do so because of this paragraph.
Inland
In and around the city
The East Cape road
State Highway 35 runs from Gisborne north around the Cape to Ōpōtiki — around three hundred and thirty kilometres of coast road through Tolaga Bay, Tokomaru Bay, Ruatōria, Te Araroa and Hicks Bay. It is one of the great New Zealand drives and unlike anywhere else in the country: small, strongly Māori communities, empty beaches, wharves, marae and the East Cape lighthouse at the very edge of the map.
It is also the part of the region most affected by Gabrielle, and some of it is still being rebuilt. Go slowly, check the road, buy your petrol and your lunch locally, and treat the places you pass through as communities rather than scenery.
Further afield
Useful links
Nine chapters on Gisborne and Tairāwhiti. Everything national — visas, registration, tax, renting, driving, schools, te ao Māori — lives in Moving to New Zealand. This region suits a particular kind of clinician extraordinarily well. If that sounds like you, see what’s open now.