I am getting near my trip to New Zealand so I logged on to Garmin to get some maps for my Etrex. Talk about disappointing! There is no equivalent to the Birdseye or Kompass system of downloadable maps - they would have you buy an SD card of all of Australia and New Zealand for the princely sum of 229 NZD. Heck - I only want a few bits of North Island!
I have tried download Open Source maps for my Garmin but with limited success. My favourite site
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ has gone into a terminal sulk and refuses to offer a download - apparently it has been like that since last October. I have tried NZ's own version
http://nzopengps.org/ but all I could get was a crude topograhic map and while my garmin says it is installed and enabled, the screen shows no features other than boundaries and roads on a black background - not a lot of use if the contours are black.
Fortunately a ViewRanger subscription to the Linz Maps of NZ is only 133 credits for the time I will need it so I will have to go with that. However, my data roaming charges are stupid money per Mb so I will have to jump from WiFi to Wifi to download the maps I need when I know where I am going. Then again, I could do it the old fashioned way!