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Published: February 24th 2005
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Cheers!
Having a tipple at the wine festival. So, on to Auckland. We flew in about lunchtime - the flight was only 3 hours and no jet lag to deal with so we liked it (despite being made to watch the Hilary Duff movie, Raise Your Voice. Just don't, it's not worth it).
We're staying with my friends Dave and Claire from Warwick at the moment which has been great. They have a flat right in the middle of the city, underneath the Sky Tower, so that's been great for getting about and seeing what Auckland has to offer. And regaining some sort of night life!
The first few days we spent wandering around Auckland itself and familiarising ourselves with where all the coffee shops/clotes stores were. You know, important stuff. We went to a couple of museums too. The art museum was free and there was loads of different styles in there too which gave everyone something to appreciate. The Auckland museum had history, natural history and New Zealand in the future. This too was over a massive area and there was so much too see. It was all (obviously in hindsight) from the Kiwi point of view - their perpective in the wars, both Maori
and world; the evolution and ecology of their island etc, which we had to keep reminding ourselves of, only ever having heard it from the British or Yankee side of things.
Also explored the Domain, which is an area of parkland in the north of the city, and visited a steam engine workshop at the edge of it where Dave works occassionally. The owner is the guy that invented some kind of steel flooring which, as luck would have it, is now used in the construction of every high rise building in the world. So now he buys old steam trains and fixes them up for a hobby. They're pretty impressive, I have to say - we got to go in the driver's cab bit and take a good look around.
Wednesday saw us taking a trip over to Rangitoto island, a volcano which erupted about 750 years ago so it's relitively new. You can see it from Auckland harbour and it was only a short ferry ride over. Once you're there there's pretty much nothing to do except climb to the top. So we did. The signs said it would take an hour to get to the
Mmmm...
This was as much of the food as we saw at the supposed Food and Wine festival. very top so when we were two thirds of the way after 25 minutes we were pretty smug. How hard can volcanos be anyway? The last 20 minutes were a bugger. It was pretty relentlessly steep all the way with the only respite being a little wood so at least we got some shade. Once we got to the top though the views back across the bay to Auckland were fantastic and the crater of Rangitoto was an almost perfect inverted cone, now covered in trees and beautiful. The whole thing about Rangitoto, well one of them, is that when the volcano erupted and created the island, the terrain was solid black lava - no soil, no nourishment, nothing to sustain life of any kind. And yet, a mere 700 odd years later, the place has a whole ecosystem going on. Apparently, after a few hundred years, mosses and lichens began to grow on the rock and this created, sparse as it was, a bed for some seeds and spores that were blown over from Auckland and the surrounding lands to take root. It's limited, yes - there are only a handful of different species growing here in terms of
actual, recognisable plants and even fewer animals - and it's quite unique too, some of these plants don't grow in this way, or in this combination, anywhere else. But they're there, and that's fairly amazing. I think.
At the weekend all four of us took another ferry ride over to Devonport, one of Auckland's oldest suburbs, where there was a food and wine festival going on. More wine than food, to be fair. We sampled wine from all over the island and had a lovely day chilling out under the trees listening to the jazz band and eating ice cream in between top-ups. And we got to keep the little wine glasses they gave us with our ticket. An excellent day. That evening was brilliant too - we started by going to a benefit concert in the Domain, complete with laser light show and fireworks, and then we headed into the city to a few bars and some dancing. Kiwis don't really start their evenings until much later here so when we found ourselves getting a burger at 4 in the morning and then going on to another club, nobody seemed to think anything of it. We had a
Volcano Statistics.
If you're interested... great night though - just what the doctor ordered.
The next day we met up with a friend Natalie from Marlow who's staying just outside Auckland for a bit (this place really is crawling with Brits) and had lunch in the Viaduct, a very chic area of restaurants down by the harbour, and did some catching up. It's so lovely to be seeing some familiar faces here and chatting to people who know a bit more about you than what country you come from and where you're going next.
Monday we set out for Waiheke, a little island about 40 minutes away, where we stayed for a couple of nights in a hostel in the bush - very relaxed and friendly but crawling with mozzies.
Monday night we set out to find some dinner. Sadly for us and our tummies most of Oneroa, the little town closest to our hostel, closes on Monday so it was a little like walking through a ghost town. This fact is mentioned nowhere in our trusty guidebook I might add. An oversight, perhaps.
Anyway, after meeting a really lovely guy who suggested some other places in nearby Surfdale, we decided to try our hand at hitching (don't worry, NZ is pretty safe and it's not at all uncommon to do it here) to the next town. We actually got picked up pretty quickly by a policeman. That's not as dodgy as it sounds - he was just bored with circling round and round the town with precious little to do so took pity on us. I think there must be one crime committed a year on the entire island, and that's probably just a misunderstanding. It's that kind of place. Ironically we didn't try to thumb a lift from him because we thought we might get into trouble, but he actually circled the block to come back for us. That's community spirit for you.
Got dropped in Surfdale and had some great dinner from the one place that was open and then walked back to the hostel. Getting back along the dirt track through the bush with no torch was something of a challenge but we made it in the end. And with hindsight we're sure the rustling in the trees was just a hedgehog. Not a puma, which in the pitch blackness was a real worry for both of us.
Ever the optimistic tourists, the next day we hired bikes despite the rain, and set off across the island to the beaches and countryside. It was actually brilliant fun, although Waiheke is deceptively hilly - get-off-and-walkably so sometimes - and we ended up covering quite some distance, eventually ending up at a nice little white sand beach in the north of the island. The weather picked up after lunch too so we had sunshine to cycle home in. We met an english lady in the hostel who has just come over from Asia etc and is headed towards the US so swapped some must-see places with her and whiled away the evening playing cards and backgammon. Got the ferry back to Auckland on Wednesday and that's been pretty much it up until now.
Tomorrow is our last day here - and our last day together for a week or so. Rach B is heading up north to the Bay of Islands for a few days and Rach F is starting on the bus tour down to the south of the island on Saturday. We should meet up again somewhere along the route a few days after Rach gets back from the North - probably in Taupo, the skydiving place, where I'm sure we'll spend more than a few days. So we'll let you know what's going on and where we are, just as soon as we've figured it out.
Hope everyone's OK back home.
Lots and lots of love,
R and R x x x x
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anonymous
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How, without a mobile?
So... you're parting for a few days, then you're planning just to meet up? But how? What if you go to the same town, and miss each other? I'm sure you've thought this through more than I. Your trip still sounds so amazing... I am massively massively jealous. NZ looks amazing, as indeed did Fiji. Going to Barbados has given me a wee bite of the travel bug, and your travel blogs are sustaining the infection... Great to see some pictures - keep them coming. I'm so impressed with you guys. Good work ladies! xx - Mike