After a 14-hour flight and skipping a full day, courtesy of passing over the international day-line, I arrived in Auckland, The City of Sails. We found ourselves a shuttle bus from the airport, which took us to our hostel in Central Auckland. Walking around the city centre, it reminded me of London in many ways. The somewhat dull and damp weather that we were met by certainly helped this.
Our first visit was to the tourist centre to try and figure out some ideas of what to do for the next couple of days. We heard that the Auckland museum was worth a visit and also had free admission. I'm not usually one to turn down free museum visits and this one did not disappoint. If it wasn't for the fact that I was chronically jet lagged, I could have easily spent an entire day at this place. It had a number of exhibitions including a volcano section, war section and natural history section. However, the area that I found most intriguing was that on Mauri culture and history and discovering how the Polynesians first came to find Aotearoa.
After visiting the museum we headed back to the hostel to use the internet and I decided to complete the essential 3S's - shower, shave and s**t! Please bare in mind that I had not shaved in 3-weeks so using a blunt razor was rather challenging and a little painful. That evening we headed down to the bar where they were serving free pizza and a host of discounted drinks. We spent the evening talking to lots of other travellers until we could no longer keep ourselves awake.
The next day, we met a Kiwi Experience guide. Kiwi Experience is the company that we will be travelling around New Zealand with. They operate a hop-on-hop-off bus tour and give you lots of advice on places to stay and activities to do. They offer a free Auckland day trip so it seemed rude to turn this down. Our tour guide Dave, was very funny and told us a great story about the Dutch explorer, Abel Tazman and the problems he encountered when he first came to visit New Zealand and didn't fully understand the etiquette of the Mauri Haka. We spent the day walking across the harbour bridge, visiting Devonport, a small Island north of Auckland and viewing the city from the top of a dormant volcano.
The rest of the day was spent chilling out and cooking ourselves dinner. We headed to bed early in order to wake up and begin our travels around the North Island. I'm now currently on the bus to Mercury Bay which will be our first stop on the trip. I've also just learned that Christchurch received an earthquake yesterday measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale - a little worrying considering we'll be arriving there in less that 3-weeks. Miraculously, only one casualty from the quake.
Much love
Sam
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