Auckland and Orewa

New Zealand

March 2007

New Zealand Bay of Islands and Cape Regina

AUCKLAND AND OREWA

Hello readers!

Well I bet you’ve really missed our updates. Sorry for the delay, but we’re quite simply having too much of a nice time relaxing in South East Asia. It’s 1am here in Phuket, Thailand and I feel we should start telling you how we found New Zealand. In NZ we moved around a lot, so we are keeping things simple by merging many of the locations in NetGallery. We’ve uploaded photos for each place but to save time and also because many places don’t warrant too much description, we’ve just used bullet points or summarised what we did. We’ll also send you just two updates, one for the North Island, and one for the South. Enjoy!

The flight from South America to New Zealand was our longest for a while and also very strange due to the change in time zones. One moment we were a lazy eight hours behind the UK. The next we’ve shot to eleven hours ahead, basically losing a day of our lives. After our silly mix up in Chile with the daylight saving change causing us to get up to early for that tour, we double checked our watches as we disembarked the plane, confident that we wouldn’t be wrong this time.

We landed just after sunrise, so to let the place wake up before we headed for the hostel, we hung around the airport soaking up all the English-ness and familiar brand names. Having been exposed to Spanish countries for the past three months we were sadly very excited to be able to understand everyone and everything. Great to be able to wander in and out of places like McDonalds and Starbucks sampling junk and also to peruse the books and magazines in the newsagents. Utter bliss.

Hearing so much about how New Zealand comprises just 4 million people and 90 million sheep, we fully expected to find the fluffy little bleeters serving behind counters and driving taxis, but alas, no. We hadn’t even booked a camper van at this point so headed straight to the rentals area and reserved the last van they had for two days time. Nothing like leaving it until the last minute!

Auckland turned out turned out to be an OK city. Nice, clean and surrounded by volcanoes, we spent two chilled out days, mooching around the shops, restaurants and cinema. We stocked up on reading material for the van in the form of poker and gossip mags and books. We dined at our favourite Japanese food chain, Wagamamma, and also checked out two very good movies… Smokin’ Aces and the cute Music and Lyrics starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. We arrived an hour early for the movie on the Sunday as once again, our host country decided to adjust their time for daylight saving and catching us out twice in so many weeks. What are the chances?

We soon realised that Auckland had a very strong Asian influence. Chinese or oriental food outlets were in abundance, and sometimes it felt like the set of Too Fast Too Furious with all the custom super cars that polluted the streets. On the Sunday night we decided to go check out the huge casino that’s to be found inside the tall circular tower that rides high in the city skyline. Crazy people bungy from the top of this rather tall structure, but we had no intention of doing so.

On our way to the casino we slipped up a side street and noticed an English style pub that was advertising a Texas Holdem Poker tournament this very evening, and better still it was free entry. We slipped in there just in time and put our names down. Was a little intimidating at first as they were all locals who played every week, but we soon made friends. They thought we would be pushovers but out of 30 players, I came 5 and rather amusingly Sarah came 4th just missing the free bar tab. Even funnier was that when we got a beer from the bar I recognised the barmaid. It turned out she also worked in the highest Irish pub in Peru where I spent many an afternoon in December. Small world hey… and again, what are the chances?

So the next day we go to the airport to pick up our camper van. They go over the whole vehicle showing how everything works from the toilet to the clever hybrid gear system. It’s basically a converted Ford high top van and has everything you need to live road bound. We ask for extra blankets, pillows and a toaster before firing it up and screeching off in search of adventure. Our first stop, not that adventurous, was the supermarket in which we spent a fortune stocking up on great foods such as Branston pickle, Cornflakes and other British delicacies.

Sarah took the role of chief navigator and armed herself with a comprehensive road map and vital highlighter pen, whilst I wound down the window and stuck my right arm out to get a tan, like white van man. We made the first campsite after dark and the kind owner showed us how to hook up the electric etc. We ate something simple like a tin of vegetable soup before tackling the krypton factor puzzle that was the bed.

We slept like babies and woke to fresh air and a shore breeze. Started the day with a soak at the local natural spa and then took to the road once again heading up to the top of the North Island. That day we stopped at a place called Goat Island and took a trip on a glass bottom boat along with a pack of school kids. It’s a 5km long marine reserve and we saw plenty of large snapper and the guide was full of interesting facts. It was called Goat Island because years ago seagoing explorers used to store goats here not only so they would recognise it in future but also to have a fresh supply of mobile meat.

Genius.