New Zealand 1 Auckland

Hello Everyone and Anyone!


Welcome to our New Zealand photoblog! We went to New Zealand for a month from September 8, 2008 to October 8, 2008. It was the trip of a lifetime! When we got married, we agreed that for each of our 50th birthdays, we could go wherever we wanted for a vacation (assuming that it was financially possible). For Annie, we went to Japan. For John, it was really a tough call between Australia and New Zealand. It finally came down to the amount of time we had. We figured that we could see a lot of New Zealand in a month, but we would only see a little of Australia. We'll have to wait until we retire to try and do a trip to Australia on the cheap.

We saved money by using the last of John's airmiles for the plane tickets. We booked most of our hotels and baches on the web, and since we were traveling off-season, we got some really great rates for some awesome places. For the plane trip, we were really worried about sitting upright for 15 hours, but since the plane was mostly empty we got to lay down and sleep for the trip.


In fact, the only bad part was that John left his cell phone on the plane in the seat pocket in front of him. So his phone went onto Sydney, Australia. Hopefully it's having a great time there. I guess the cell phone didn't agree with the decision of New Zealand over Australia!

At any rate, we landed in Auckland at about 4:30 am and then found some benches to sleep on until the airport "woke up". We couldn't get into our hotel room until 8:00 am (we had arranged for early check-in), so we just hung around the airport until 7:30.





Even with sleeping on the plane, we were pretty groggy after checking into the hotel. But we went out walking and Annie saw that harbor cruises were half-price, so we had a great cruise for our lunch picnic. Above is one of the skyline photos we took of Auckland. You can see the Sky Tower on the right of the picture. Strangely enough, there's a casino on the ground floor.

After the cruise we continue wandering around town. We were trying to find a grocery store, when we saw this view of the old gaslamps down a street on the harbor. The beautiful building in back is the Ferry Building. There's so much water around Auckland that it is easier to use ferries than having to drive your car around to the bridges.

We visited Kelly Tarleton's Underwater Encounter by meeting a van at the base of the Sky Tower. Kelly took over an old water treatment facility, with large pipes running everywhere, and made an aquarium out of it. In the picture to the left, you can see that there is a moving "side walk" that you can stand on, and if you want to stop and watch something, you get off the moving strip and stand where Annie is standing. It seemed that the fish were happier than in many aquariums that I have seen, because they had a longer path to swim. They just didn't swim to the other side of the aquarium. They could swim in a single direction for a long way without bumping into a wall and having to turn around. Tons of penguins also (Gentoos and Kings for those who are interested in penguins).

When the van dropped us back off at the Sky Tower, we decided to go up to the top and see what Auckland looked like from there. It was nice to see the entire harbor area, the town and everything. It's hard to capture all that in a photo and John was not successful in doing so! You could feel the tower move in the wind as it was blowing about 30 miles/hr that day.

While we were up on the tower, a bungy jumper came flying down (in the picture to the left, you can see him dressed in blue and yellow towards the bottom center of the photo). John had the camera on "burst" mode, so he took about 50 pictures as the bungy jumper flew by, but this one looked like it was the best.

New Zealanders will jump off anything that sits still long enough. It seems that there is a collective death wish among them! Everywhere you go, there is some "extreme" sport, where you can risk life and limb. While we were there, a Chinese tourist was killed in one of the jet boats that roar up and down every river over six inches deep. The boat hit a gravel bar and flipped, trapping the lady underneath the boat. But, it's a high adrenaline country.

This last photo is the Spirit of New Zealand, a replica sailing ship that goes around the harbor. Not sure if it is powered, but it looked like it was going pretty fast, for as little sail as she had on. But the Kiwis are some of the world's best sailors, so it's possible that they are just on sail power.

So that's it for Auckland! Of course, we (and by that we mean "John") took hundreds more pictures (about 2500 pictures over the entire trip), but it's best to limit the photos.

In the next blog post, we rent a car and drive from Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsula. It's a gorgeous place, with tons of beautiful beaches and hikes.