Our world tour Part 1

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October 19, 2016

Auckland is an interesting city. Depending who you talk to, it has about 1,5 million inhabitants, which is about a third of the whole population. Kind of amazing. I don't know any other country with similar characteristics.

The economy of the country is concentrated around agriculture (dairy, fruits, fish and lately, wine).

Today we dedicated our day to wine, not just drinking, but visiting 2 wineries. Wine in New Zealand is principally (over 80%) white wine, chardonnay and souvignon blanc. Wineries are still small and production is still limited, which turns New Zealand wine in realitively expensive. In restaurants you can buy local wine or imported and invariably, local wines are more expensive than the imported ones. Quality of the wine is good, although the wines from one of the wineries we visited did not convince me.

Between the 2 wineries, we visited Tasman beach that is the home of a great number of gannets (a large seagull type bird) that come here to breed in large colonies. Many large birds on a small stretch of land. Another interesting point of this beach is that the sand is (volcanic) black sand.

The afternoon we spent visiting the skytower, a city icon that can be seen from anywhere in the city. The tower is part of a casino/ hotel complex and with 328 meter is the highest building in the southern hemisphere. (Another item to take of the bucketlist.....). The tower offers the possibility of benji jumping and an arial walk outside the tower on a narrow walkway. The benji did not attracted me (too high for my taste), but I would have liked the arial walk. Both attractions unfortunately were closed due to high winds. Maybe next time....

The day ended with a nice meal in an italian restaurant, after which we went back to the hotel in time to go to the closing of the happy hour at the hotel's club and to start packing our suitecases for our trip to Los Angeles tomorrow.

We have decided to stay a couple of days in the LA area before flying back on Saturday to Miami.



Fotos to follow.

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