An Absence of Adventure

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December 1st 2006

Published: December 4th 2006

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Inspirado

Sky Jish

Here's Jish checking out the base of Auckland's most imposing sight: the Sky Tower.

Well, it seems there are times on a world trip that travellers experience what I can only describe as The Void. Basically this equates to a complete lack of doing anything interesting to blog about! The weather has been against us for the majority of the week with nasty cold winds bringing the temperature starkly down, even when we've been lucky enough to have brilliant sunshine overhead. We've been out and about despite the wind though the rain has dampened our spirits on more than one occasion. The result is that we've stuck to the city centre and seafront and I've got nothing particularly exciting to tell you.

On Wednesday evening, the skies cleared completely and we tried to take advantage of it by heading over to The Observatory, where we were hoping to attempt to stargaze via a proper telescope again as we had failed to do in Singapore recently. We caught the bus from near Albert Park and were greeted by the most miserable bus driver in the world. He drove like a man pissed off with the entire universe and we were thrown about the bus in a fashion not experienced since we left China. There were

Sky Jumper

People pay money to jump off the Sky Tower. Crazy!

no announcements on the bus to say which stop we were at and the driver wouldn't help us so we took a gamble and got off when we thought we were on the right road and when we could see a corresponding volcanic mount (we were looking for One Tree Hill).

As it transpired, the hill we were at was Mount Eden, miles away from where we wanted to be. We only had 20 minutes to make it to the Observatory and there was no way we would make it, even if we had known the way. It was only thanks to our visit to Mount Eden last week that we knew how to get back to the hostel on foot although we were on the other side of the hill this time and it took almost 1.5 hours to get back. We could have waited and caught a bus back into town but, as I'm sure you'll imagine, bus drivers weren't our favourite people at that moment in time. The fact that Glynn had been feeling under the weather for a couple of days also didn't help matters. A total waste of time and money.

Thursday saw

Victoria Street

A nice view of the Sky Tower from one end of Victoria Street, near Albert Park.

us venture to Victoria Park Market which was about 3/4 hour walk away from the hostel. It was a bit too touristy for our tastes as almost all the shops were full of souvenirs rather than local crafts which were had been hoping to see. we did pick up a dinky little rucksack for Jish though :-)

We did have a nice walk down to the waterfront on Friday afternoon when the sun popped out for a few hours and we wandered leisurely amongst the sailboats that have resulted in Auckland being dubbed the 'City of Sails'. With the strong breeze still blowing, there were plenty of yachts out at sea too making the harbourfront look very picturesque indeed. It was tempting to jump on a boat for a tour of the many islands around Auckland but the budget wouldn't quite allow unfortunately.

The rest of our time has been spent reading thanks to the ever-brilliant city library or simply browsing through the various quarters of the city's shopping areas. I am now the proud owner of a small plush Hello Kitty who is just the cutest stuffed toy I think I've ever seen, (after Jish of course).