City of Sails

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We got into our hostel at 2pm today then promptly went to sleep, we never slept much on the plane so had been up for about 30 hours, a few hours later we are up at them and out to explore Auckland city.

Already we love Auckland, it's an amzing city, it's twice the size of London with just over one million people, it's really spread out but the centre is quite small, small enough to walk everywhere, we're down at the Harbour side of Queen Street.

It's really like Edinburgh, loads of greenery, plenty familiar shops and loads of English accents.

We set about exploring the centre, the Sky Tower, the Harbour Bridge, Albert Park and down the Waterfront.

Now Fiona said that we would save money here and it is really cheap, well the accomodation is quite pricey but the pound is so strong here, about 2.62 NZ$ each, so most things are cheap.

We had went to a wee cafe for lunch when we were waiting to get into our hostel earlier and 2 sandwhiches and drinks were $13, about a fiver so all was good.

We were wandering about the hearbour looking for something healthy to eat when we came accross a really nice restaurante that was really price, we'll start budgeting tomorrow we said and in we went. Now it was very pricey (and trendy) for Auckland but it was only $100, about 38 notes, all in, drink starters and a sweet, this is defo the place to be to look after yourself.

We ended the night in a internet cafe planning the rest of our New Zealand trip, it's the middle of summer here and everything is booked up pretty heavy so we planned where we were going and e-mailed a lot of places looking for accomodation, we had decided to get a 4 week bus tour of both of the Islands but Fiona has now suggested renting a car, sounds like a decent idea but it's one hell of a journey to drive around, we're going to look at prices and that and see what the deal is with these bus tours tomorrow.

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Photos

Auckland Skyline
from North motorway

Skytower
from Downtown