Week one

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Right. Blog. I was so sure that I wouldn't write one; thought I'd be too busy every hour of the day to do it. Well as it turns out, the act of travelling does leave quite a bit of time on your hands; especially when it's pissing it down outside and you have three hours to kill before getting a bus, and Facebook has been checked again and again and again. Anyway, I've said that I'll do one now. Gotta stick to my word.

So after 26 long, hazy hours in the sky with Air New Zealand (hazy thanks to the stewards who would bound up and down the aisle every half an hour, brandishing a wine bottle in each hand like maracas), I had not only managed to watch pretty much every film in the Oscar race this year, but I also managed to arrive in Auckland. London was 18,331km away. I was now closer to both the North and South pole that I was to home. It should have been terrifying; all I felt was excitement. This was the realisation of months and months of planning and working - I was here.

My accommodation for the first couple of nights was a quaint little place (key word: quaint) just outside Auckland's central district.
First mistake: booking accommodation for more than a few nights. I stupidly thought that I would need six days - six days! - to get over my jet-lag and see Auckland properly. For the former, I didn't need more than a good night's sleep; for the latter, really didn't need more than three days. I realised on maybe my second or third night that I was doing completely the opposite of what I should be doing as a backpacker: I was sticking to one place, not out of love for the location but for security. I had got this all wrong. This was mildly exacerbated by the - how can I put this? - slightly cult-like air that this place had. People seemed to come here and never leave. On the 'house rules' sheet it listed 'no intoxication' and 'no swearing or profanity'; I kept a constant look-out for wicker and Christopher Lee around the place. This wasn't helped by the Jonestown-esque architecture the place had.

Auckland is a great city. It feels big and cosmopolitan, but friendly. I could live there, happily. If you spend almost a week there, however... there's kind of fuck-all to do. It has some great places to see - eg. Mount Eden, a dormant volcano with a 50-metre crater just kind of casually plonked in the middle of the city; or Waiheke, an island off the coast
with a million tiny coves and beaches, where you can feel completely alone (and strip down to your pants and have a swim, and then realise that the beach has suddenly become quite popular, and that you have to stand around for two hours to dry... hilarity, i'm sure, ensued). But if I had my time again, I probably would have started this trip a bit differently.

It was a nice place, it really was; as was my accommodation. But that was it... nice. I was ready to be out of my depth and pushed to New Experiences, to see New Places and meet New People. Which led to me, despite everything I have been saying for months about not wanting to it, booking onto the Kiwi Experience.

That is something I thought I would never do. It was an impulse (it was also pretty cheap). Whether it turns out well or not, I don't know. I was always completely headstrong about wanting to do it my own way - and while I still am, and hopefully will... there's no reason why I can't have a few good nights out while I'm doing it.

All aboard.

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