American travel blogger Dorit Liss desperate to leave New Zealand after vandals smash motorhome

A pair of American tourists are desperate to flee New Zealand just a few months into their year-long trip after they said they were victimised by bullies and vandals.

Dorit Liss, 27, and her partner Andre, 29, said they have felt “nothing but unsafe and unwelcome” since they arrived from Colorado in late October.

“We’d be in a designated, like self-contained parking spot that was on the city council website, like approved place to be and people would just come by in the middle of the night, honking and yelling obscenities and banging on our RV, banging on other campers, you know, vans and whatnot in the parking lot,” Liss said.

“Everywhere we’ve been parked there has been some instance of someone coming by and honking at us.”

Liss posted to her YouTube channel last week recounting an incident in Christchurch that cemented their decision to leave the country.

She said after picking a “quiet and abandoned” part of Christchurch on January 8 to park their camper, she and her partner were woken suddenly at 5.45am by the sound of smashing glass.

“I bolted upright all at once, I was made aware of what had happened, the sleep-induced delay of my response made it so the car sped away completely scot-free,” Liss said.

“It left me and Andre standing in the middle of our shattered home, I sobbed and shook.”

Seven windows in the pair's Daihatsu van were smashed while in the Christchurch Red Zone.

Police confirmed they were investigating the incident.

The vandals smashed seven windows of the tourists’ van, which they struggled to get fixed given the age of the vehicle. She said she has been “inundated” with panic attacks since the vandals struck the camper.

Liss said the incident “allowed” her to accept what she had been thinking ever since she arrived in the country at the end of October, which is that she hates it here.

Her bio on TikTok reads “New Zealand is killing us” and on Instagram she captioned a recent post “Special thanks to @purenewzealand for making this one hell of a ‘vacation’”.

She responded to a comment on a previous post about where she may go next by saying “sure as f*** not this rock in the sea”.

Colorado-born Dorit Liss and her partner are now desperate to leave the country.

Liss said she had felt nothing but “unsafe and unwelcome” since their arrival.

“It’s destroying me to continue to push through each day. It’s destroying Andre too.

“We both have each other but that feels like a lame excuse to keep trudging uphill in a place where neither of us are happy.

“We’re going to be leaving as soon as we can.”

Rachel Maher is an Auckland-based reporter who covers breaking news. She has worked for the Herald since 2022.