Auckland Adventures

Hello from Auckland!

Having a great time here in the southern hemisphere and thought I would try to catch up since I left Sydney.

The One World partner I flew on to get here was LAN airlines.  They are a South American airline that I actually flew when I was going to/from Buenos Aries and Rio a few years ago.  It didn’t make sense why they would be doing the Sydney to Auckland flight until I learned they were then flying on to Santiago, Chile.

Since I was going international, I was able to get into the Qantas business class lounge in Sydney.  It’s nice.  It was breakfast time and they had a buffet laid out in two areas and had various wine, beer, and hard alcohol out for you to make whatever drink you might wish.  Highly recommend that lounge if you are stuck in Sydney.  I will be having a relatively long layover when I am going from Cairns to Sipidan and look forward to lounging.

Fix yourself a drink in the Qantas lounge

Legroom on the plane...
watching Black Mass

The flight itself was pretty nice although the lady at the gate told the group of business class people they had to wait because they were loading from the back of the plane forward.  Really?  I am not really sure what bug had crawled up her butt, but she turned a group of us around and told us to “get in line”.  I am flying back to Sydney to connect to Cairns in a couple of days so it will be interesting if this is a LAN policy of if she was just having a bad day.

I got into Auckland just in time to hit rush hour.  It took an hour or so to make it in from the airport.  The hotel, Citylife, is pretty nice and super conveniently located.  I am probably 5 blocks from the harbor and right around the corner from the Sky Tower.

Dan, brother in law, all around good guy, was here in December so I have been asking him where good places to go for food/drink and through sheer coincidence (or maybe because Auckland isn’t huge), I had dinner the first night at a place called Soul without knowing it was where he went one of his last nights here and then he told me the name of a beer place by the harbor and I read that email (by signing into the free wifi of a bus that was sitting nearby) while I was drinking a beer AT THAT PLACE!  Cray Cray

Alcohol percentage is right on.  Plus it's interesting that they have the number of drink equivalents labeled there.  Half a liter of 6.66% alcohol is 2.6 standard drinks

No 1 Queen Street.  Where I was sitting when I pirated Dan's email from a nearby bus.  Could be anywhere in Portland...beer and food trucks.

I am meeting his friend, Susy, tomorrow and going to dinner with her on my last night in town.

So what have I been doing?  Well yesterday I toured the city with the help of the Hop On Hop Off bus.  It’s exactly what it sounds like.  A tour bus that does a loop (or in this case 2 loops that overlap at one location) that you ride and if you want to check out one of the places where they stop, you hop off, check it out, and then hop on another one of their busses that comes later.  One of the loops has a bus coming by every 30 minutes which isn’t too bad.  The other loop is every hour…so if it’s something relatively short, you are waiting around for a while for the bus to come pick you up.

The cool thing is they also point out various landmarks and what not you might be passing by even if they don’t stop.  So I got to see a couple of overlook areas, the aquarium (yes I am a sucker for those), the rose garden (maybe ¼ the size of Portland’s so I saw that from the bus only), the Auckland Museum, the winter garden (which was really nice, but not as well labeled as the Royal Bottanical Garden.  I was wondering what some of the plants were and couldn't find a marker). Eden Hill, passing by the zoo (got there later and didn’t want to try to plow through it in the 2 hours I had), and then the Sky Tower….along with a mall I didn’t stop at.

No idea what this is...

Penguins!

Short tailed Sting Ray saying Hell0

Had a moving beltway in the shark tunnel

Octo!

Spiny sea dragons.  Pretty cool

There were other places, but I forget what all they were.  Oh!  We did drive by the stadium where the New Zealand Black play rugby…the driver asked if there were any Australians on the bus and when a few sort of cheered out, he pointed out Eden Park, where the Black play, and where the Australians have never won a rugby match. 

Aucklanf Museum

Maori boat stretching almost the entire width of the museum

As if stringed instruments aren't loud enough on their own, someone thought this was a good idea at one time

Obvious joke on this one: I want my mummy.   But the reason I am sharing this with you, dear reader, is that this mummy was acquired for 5 pounds from an egyptologist in 1888....5!  Then to add insult to injury, the museum got it in 1958 in echange for a coconut grater and a drum.   You know the mummy is thinking "that's bullcrap!"

Winter Garden...one of the green houses

Lilypad pool in the tropical greenhouse.  Temperature rose a TON walking into this one

This stuff writes itself!  The name of the fernery is awesome

Pretty flower

Boobie!

Had dinner at this Italian place last night that had killer lamb and potatoes cooked in lardo.  I had read the yelp review where the person said the potatoes were just roasted and no big deal.  That person needs to be slapped cause they had this crisp browning that reminded me of mom’s leftover baked potatoes cooked in bacon grease and that stuff is all kinds of awesome.

After dinner, I hit the casino below the Sky Tower.  I figured I would gamble $200 at blackjack and if I lost it, oh well.  They do have slots, but they all looked different and I have no idea if the payouts are regulated like Nevada so I didn’t even try that.  I won $400 in about 30 minutes.  Actually, I probably won $550 or so but gambled back down to $400 winnings before I said enough and walked away.  So now I have all this funny money I will need to convert.  Luckily I will be in Australia for about a week so I can convert to their currency and probably pay for all my meals while there.

View towards the harbor from the Sky Tower

Auckland Harbor bridge.  They apparently climb that one too but it's not nearly as tall as the Sydney one.  Of course, they also bungy jump from this one so maybe it IS a good time

They had signs up about how this glass was as strong as the concrete around it and blah blah.  Still had a bit of a whirl in the tummy doing this.  I know it's not going to happen, but this super strong glass can still slip through the hole they had to cut for it!

View of the museum from the tower

Today I went on what I have affectionately been calling the dork tour.  I did a day excursion out to Hobbiton (not Hobbit town as has been pointed out to me by one dork) to see the set from Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.  I have had a few people tell me I should go do it and when I have brought it up with other people with a bit of an eye roll, without fail, if they have done the tour they enthusiastically say it was an awesome experience.  Well I have to sort of agree.  I mean my life would have been okay had I not been there, but it was pretty cool to see all these hobbit homes on this farm as well as the Green Dragon Inn where they drink in the film and where we got a free beer!

Obligatory sheep photo.  I dunno.  Tam took 5000 photos of sheep when he was in New Zealand so I didn't want to miss out

Hobbit holes!

Me in front of a 90% life sized door

Inside the only hole they let you go in...it holds the umbrellas for rainy days

Bilbo's house!

Details are impressive...looking down at the chimneys of hobbit holes on the hill below Bilbo's house

The bridge over to the Green Dragon Inn

Inside the green dragon!

The funny part was we had people from China, India, and Chile and only some of them understood English.  The poor guide, Megan, was trying to herd this group who only barely paid attention or even understood her when she said “only go this far”.  It was pretty hilarious to watch it all happen

After that we went to Waitomo caves to see the glow worms.  In the caves, there are these worms that attach to the ceiling and glow to attract insects to then eat them.  Pretty cool deal where you get into a boat and they sort of pull you along through this cave under “starry” skies of glowing worms.  Unfortunately no photos allowed cause they don’t trust people to not use the flash.

The bus driver for the day, Allan, was pretty interesting.  He kept a rolling commentary/story telling going on for at least half the drive (we left at 8 am and got back at 7pm).  He was a wealth of trivia about the areas we were driving through as well as the history of New Zealand.  One thing he brought up was since it’s a volcanic land, there are trace elements that don’t exist that need to be introduced.  For crops, they HAVE to fertilize otherwise things will die out after a few seasons.  For people, he was saying if you lived here full time you would need to take a multivitamin to help out with the missing minerals.  I’m going to have to look that up to see if it’s true.  I would think Hawaii would have the same problems, but I have never heard of that before.

Hit a brewery tonight when I got back for some refreshment and dinner.  Not only do they have good beers of their own…and really, there are some GOOD beers here, they also have bottles from Gigantic brewing in Portland and Pelican Brewing from Pacific City!  Neither one of them is like a huge brewery, but there were bottles from both in their bottle fridges.  Crazy.

Beer goodness!

Damn!  I am a week early for their fresh hop fest!

Heading out to Waiheke Island today to do some wine tasting I think.  I might skip that and go to the art museum.  Allan, the bus driver, said they had a copy of Shakespeare’s plays published a couple of years after his death on display.  It’s the 400^th anniversary of his death so they brought it out of storage...seems like something cool to see.

Leaving here for Cairns tomorrow and then onto a liveaboard with no internet for 4 days after that.  So the next update will be a while unless I do a quick one tomorrow evening. 

Either way, remember: It’s our time, the people’s time!

Love to all

Jim