Whites Bay is another beautiful DOC site with some amazing walks straight from the site, which suits us perfectly. The site itself is quite large, but split into areas and we, for most of our first two week visit, had a section all to ourselves. With the bay itself less than two minutes walk from the van you really couldn't ask for more.
During our first trip to this site we really enjoyed the challenging walks from the site and very rarely left the area. One of the walks is a 10km loop track that ascends 700m through some very rough track....awesome :-). Other tracks took us up onto the heads looking out to the sounds or into the native bush. So much variety that we decided that on our planned trip to the North Island we'd stop here again as it was only 20kms from Picton.
Our second visit to the area coincided with one of the public holidays and, just for the weekend, we got a taste of how busy this place must be in summer.....whoah, madness with a continuous stream of traffic! As with most of these sites though it was all quiet by about 11pm so all good.