Blogs from North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 1187

Greetings from Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand and the final stop on our trip (if you don't count our airline connections in LA and Philadelphia). We arrived here last night by plane. We flew out of the beautiful Dunedin International Airport (not being sarcastic - it's a really nice, spacious, well-designed airport, especially when you consider the city it serves only has a population of 100,000). We arrived in Auckland around 11:00 pm, and took a shuttle to our Backpackers in the center of the city. Our travel-bleary eyes were a little startled by the 24-hour party atmosphere of Auckland Central Backpackers. The place is massive, in a 10+ storey tall building which we think was formerly an office tower. In addition to accomodation, it includes a bar and nightclub, internet cafe, travel bureau, ... read more

TGIF! Yahoo! School ended today, officially, it ended yesterday for me since I don't have class on fridays. All I have left is a take home music final that should be easy-it's only worth 10% of my grade. I still have my Maori Culture & Society Final, which is on the 18th, and worth 50%, I will need to study for that. I only studied for about 15 or 20 minutes for my Maori Business final and I got an A on that! yay! Tonight is the international party down at the loaded hog bar. I Pregamed in my room and played beer pong against brian. we played 2 games, with 4 beers in the first and 3 in the second. 7 beers in only about 10 minutes. It was tough... We headed over to the ... read more

Our bus for Auckland didn’t leave until 1:00 pm, so the owner of our hotel told us to go into town, enjoy ourselves, have lunch and he would meet us at the transport center with our bags. He was there on time and our bus to Auckland was totally full. We made it to Auckland and went back to the Hyatt. The bellman at the Hyatt had gotten information on sending our bag back to the US and it was in the $300 range! Michael decided that he was going to see if the Hyatt would store our one bag until January. Since they have a storage room and Michael has been a good Hyatt client I thought that was a great idea. They immediately agreed. I hope it’s there when we return! We went out ... read more

I took a day off from research (because two days of working is so rough) today to go wine tasting. Leah (the other suitemate) and I came up with this great idea last night when she decided that she didn’t want to go to class. And I, not having any classes ever, am a willing companion on any adventure around Auckland. We took a bus about 45 minutes out of the city center to a suburb called Hendersen. After getting off the bus a few stops too early, we walked a mile or so up a hill with a beautiful view of Auckland and the bay. On the way we passed some gardens with wonderful-smelling spring flowers, as well as a couple of cows. At the top of the hill was Babich Vineyard, where I’d ... read more

Hello again. I know, it’s been a while. My initial concept of updating this thing weekly (if not daily) appears to have been a tad optimistic. Anyway- apology over, on with the blog… As you can see from the location, we are currently in a cold and wet Auckland (the change in temperature, it has to be said, is not one of the highlights of the trip so far…). As you can imagine, much ground has been covered since last I wrote, so best to crack on. After leaving Koh Samui, we headed south, in the direction of Malaysia. Heading south in Thailand, the country becomes more Muslim- lots of Islamic schools, and virtually all the women wearing hidjabs. It would no doubt be an interesting region to spend some time, but unfortunately it is not ... read more