Tag Archives: New Zealand

Mar6

Exploring Auckland – A reminder of what a real city is like

Posted on by
Standard

CouchSurfing:

Instead of booking hostels or anything, my plan for Auckland revolved around a pair of CouchSurfers that I had contacted earlier on. Anais was a French girl currently living in New Zealand with her boyfriend Andre, and they had offered to host me for the first half of my eight days in the city, a deal that I couldn’t pass up. They were both quite cool, and much more of a “high class” than one would expect of couch surfers.

To be completely honest, both Anais and Andre would have fit into a New York sitcom almost perfectly – Andre ran a series of companies that he had started a few years back, primarily set on import/export (no, not Mafia stuff) while Anais was a professional photographer for the rich and famous of Auckland. Between the two of them they must have made quite a nice living, because their apartment was a place that I am still jealous of; a flat straight out of a bachelors dreams.

Everything in it was sized to fit a small group of people, but also to work when hosting friends. Instead of a TV they had a projector aiming out of the kitchen and onto the balcony, but the screen could retract back into the ceiling when it wasn’t in use, thus turning the area from a TV lounge into a small sitting area. This was where I stayed, sharing the living room with a French brother and sister team named Heloise and Adrian who had been traveling around the world nearly as long as I had.

 

Sleeping:

This city is actually quite cool, temperature-wise, but its rather humid and whoever designed the apartment that I was staying at really didn’t have a strong knowledge of air circulation. Thanks to this, the one night that I did sleep inside on the couch (as befitting a couch surfer) I barely got any sleep, instead spending the entire night tossing and turning, trying to find the one cool spot on the couch.

So, the next day I took advantage of what I think was my favorite part of their flat: the deck. It was right on the main street, unfortunately, but while being on the street meant that there was a constant stream of cars it also meant that there was an amazing breeze blowing across the deck. And so I huffed and I puffed and I inflated my air-mattress, rolled out my sleeping bag, and slept the night away to the sounds of a living city for the first time since I left Boston.

 

Returning the car:

Honestly, I walked into the rental office expecting a fight. Not a knuckle-bloodying fight, but instead a “well, we have to charge you for… and you won’t get your security deposit back because…” style fight – the ones that career lawyers love. And the fact that I needed to be awake at 6:30 in order to get to the airport in time didn’t help the situation much, I’ll admit.

Fortunately, I was once again impressed with Kiwi logic and honesty; the return itself took no more than 10minutes. I brought the keys in, we walked the car down quickly, and he helped me check to make sure that I hadn’t left anything in the back seat. Then I was handed a receipt showing that my security deposit was refunded, and the rental guy walked me over to the bus stop, to make sure I was able to get onto the next bus to the main airport terminal. Simple, efficient, and clean. I’ll miss this country.

And just to reinforce how much I’ll miss New Zealand, I didn’t even have to catch a bus back to the main city from the airport. Instead of paying for the $16 bus fare, I simply flagged down a car driving towards the city as it left the main parking lot. The guy who ended up stopping (and I only had to wait about 10min for someone to stop to pick me up) was a guy about my age who had just finished dropping his friend off, to fly out to Bali. He was driving one of the super-tiny British cars that you see every so often… your stereotypical clown-car. We joked about it for a few minutes, and then proceeded to shoot the breeze about parkour for the entire ride back to the main city. I’m really going to miss New Zealand when I leave.

 

Eating and exploring Kingsland:

After returning the car, I really didn’t have too much to do for the rest of the day. So I went with my fallback plan for when I’m bored in any city – put on my headphones, crank the tunes, and start walking in a random direction.

Auckland’s much more hilly than Christchurch was, but it’s much much less so than San Francisco; to be honest, its quite like Boston in that regards. The main city itself is on a large hill, crowned by Victoria Park, but out in the Kingsland district the hills were much smaller and easier to navigate, and so I made quite good time on my little wander. The street-art of the city was amazing, and I saw a mural down by the train tracks that takes the price for the most impressive work of urban-art that I’ve seen to date. It was massive, made up of dozens of smaller pieces that all flowed together like a lucid dream that you can’t quite control. I spent nearly 15min just following the trails of thought that spread through the wall, examining each small piece which in turn lead to another small piece…

 

While I was wandering I stopped in for a few bites to eat as I saw fit – the upside of wandering around for hours is that you get to explore a city far more in-depth than you would on a tour, but the downside is that you work up a serious hunger, especially if the area is as hilly as Kingsland was. Thankfully there were some amazing small cafes scattered around for me to sample.

I stopped in for Lunch at a burger place that called itself “the best home-made burger in Auckland”… and actually had the facts to back it up – if their signage and honor-wall was to be believed they had won the “Best burger in Auckland” award nearly 8 years running… though I did notice a conspicuous absence of a 2008 award in that roll… With or without 2008 though, the burger was unbelievable. Thick, juicy, and with sauces dripping all over the plate, it was actually quite a challenge to eat without coating my clothes in burger. But ohh was it worth the effort, I can definitely see why they won so many awards.

If the burger-joint was the beginning of my wander, then a small coffee was the end of it. A bit before heading back to my hosts apartment to help them prepare dinner I stopped in at a little cafe that caught my eye, thanks to a small little gremlin painting outside on the wall. While it did make me feel a bit too much like a New York hipster, I took the chance to enjoy a nice cup of mocha while doing some writing for this story… definitely a good way to relax after a day of exploring.

 

Exploring the Beach:

On the 24th all of us got up together and headed out early to explore one of the nearby beaches that Anais goes to for her daily run. Our trip started out with a quick visit over to Andre’s office for Anais to upload some photos to her website, after which we all piled back into Anais’s van and trucked out to the main beach itself.

Heloise, Adrian and I headed out towards the main beach to explore while Anais went for her run, and so we found ourselves blazing a path over the sand dunes and through the scrub grass, trying to find the actual beach. It wasn’t an easy task, but after a few minutes we did finally find the sandy section of the waterfront. It was an amazingly wide beach, not unlike the horizon-to-horizon ones that I saw in Aruba or San Francisco, and the sand had this strange quality to it where the first few inches were very soft and giving, but underneath the sand was hard-packed… meaning that our feet sunk down an inch or two into the soft grain sand with every step, leaving deep footprints behind us.

In the few hours that we had, we explored all the way down the beach to the far rocks, where we found a series of amazing sea caves! Adrien and I explored fairly deep into these cracks in the seawall, though the fact that our only flashlight was my iPod really limited how far into the caves we could actually go. It was honestly some of the most beautiful rock that I’ve seen to date, with the water dripping down and making some amazing formations that I’d never seen anywhere else. We did have to cut our adventure a bit short though, since the tide had started coming in about half an hour after we arrived, and the sea was slowly creeping into the cave mouths, blocking off any exit, save by swimming.

Thankfully we didn’t end up having to swim, although I did get another chance to do a bit of rock climbing, in order to keep my shorts dry. Since the tide had cut off most of the more interesting areas of the beach Adrien and I met back up with Heloise, and started walking back to the car park to meet Anais for some lunch, before heading back into the city again.

 

A dinner party with the Dutch:

One evening I got to attend a dinner party with Anais and Andre; Heloise and Adrien had invited a few of their friends over to Anais and Andre’s flat (Ed Note: See Ben’s post on differences between Europeans and People from the States, it ties into the “they invited people to someone else’s house”), and so we were all going to cook something up and make a fun and fancy evening out of it.

The party was set to start around 7:00, but unfortunately Heloise and Adrien’s friends got a bit stuck on the train and didn’t arrive until more like 8:30 or so. But once they did arrive they started passing out the beers, Anais and I served up the salad and chicken dish that we had prepped up earlier in the day, and we all got down to the business at hand – partying and telling random travel stories. The night was full of rather amazing cultural quips, stories, and random tidbits of information about life far across the seas – I learned a lot about the Netherlands, and thanks to these guys a lot of the stories about mythological Amsterdam were debunked, either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who’s opinion you ask.

The party actually ended on a slightly awkward note, since Andre crashed pretty early, and Anais followed him about half an hour later, around 10:30 or so, but people didn’t start leaving until nearly two in the morning. I felt a little bad about this, but I didn’t really feel like it was my place to say anything, since Adrien and Heloise had been staying at the flat for a bit longer than I had, and if they felt it was ok then they probably knew Anais better.

 

Exploring Auckland itself:

The day after the dinner party I headed into the city again, this time to meet up with the Danes from the night before. We all met up at one of the main train stations, and headed into the pouring rain to do a bit of exploring of the city.

Off all of the cities that I’ve been to in the world, Auckland most reminds me of central New York – it has a vibrancy to it, but it’s dulled by the knowledge that this city is huge… at least relative to other New Zealand cities. Everyone that we walked past seemed to either be a tourist, lost and dazed by the tall buildings, or a resident rushing to or from work. The art and sculptures around the city were amazing, but they were tempered by the fact that nearly no one was paying attention to them – instead people were focusing on the shops and each other. It was a strange feel, and I have a feeling that I would start to find it off-putting after a fairly short amount of time. For now though, I was able to sort of ignore it, and keep myself entertained by talking to the folks traveling around with me.

The day went by pretty quickly, even with the insane amount of rain falling on the city. We ate some sushi for lunch, wandered through what seemed to be a grade-school field day, and even played a few games of pool in a small bar that we found in one of the main malls. It was enjoyable, but somewhat strange for me – I’d been in Christchurch for nearly five months at this point, and so the tallest building I had seen was maybe four or five stories at the University of Canterbury. Being in the Concrete Jungle again was a new experience… akin to coming home to a place that you’ve missed, only to find out that its not 100% to your liking any more.

Feb28

The Great North-Island Adventure: A New Zealand Road Trip – Day 3

Posted on by
Standard

It’s finally time – to pack up my bag again and move on from New Zealand. What calls me onward is not a new country, but instead a return to a home that I haven’t seen in months. I would enjoy staying in New Zealand for another six months, but unfortunately a lack of good job options and my non-infinite bank accounts have conspired together, and the clearest course for me is to return home to rest and rebuild my finances before starting out again on another world trip.

For now, what that means is that I am taking my leave of Christchurch. While the city has been amazing to me, I haven’t had the time to see anything of the North Island as of yet, and so I’ve planned out a road trip in order to remedy this.

The dawn broke… and then shattered into a thousand droplets that rained down onto my tent. So I guess the bugstorm did help me out a bit, in the end, since they forced me into setting up my tent versus simply laying out a sleeping pad. That realization didn’t make getting out of the tent any easier though, and it took me nearly half an hour to finally motivate myself enough to brave the rainstorm.

Once I did leave the tent, I found myself in a place that looked a bit like what I had seen the night before – the fog was thick over the road, the rain was drizzling down (not nearly as bad as it had seemed while inside the tent), and everything was coated in a thick layer of “eww, I want to go back to sleep!” Thankfully all of the sandflys that had infested the car the night before seemed to have died, or at least disappeared, and so I was able to stuff my sleeping back back into my backpack without any interference from small flying insects. I didn’t end up packing the tent up though, opting instead of just let it sit in the back seat and hopefully dry out a bit before I got into Auckland that night.

And so, back onto the road I went. The morning wasn’t really much different from the night before, if we’re being honest, except for the possibility of the landscape being even more creepy in the daylight. The sun hadn’t fully broken the clouds and fog by the time I started off again, and so my total visibility was just a few hundred meters. This combined with two other facts to convince me that we, as a planet, were being invaded my alien war-robots: I was driving under power lines, and the fog was still thick around the hills. Why did that convince me of an alien invasion? On the side of the road all that I could make out was the vague shape of hills rolling by, each topped with a large bipedal metal creatures standing guard like great sentinels.

(Ed Note: if you weren’t sure, Ben means that the Electrical line towers were blanketed in fog just enough to look line alien robots on top of the hills that he was driving by)

As the morning wore on, the fog did slowly lift off of the landscape, and I got to see more of the reason why people love New Zealand – the countryside is amazing. The hills and rock outcroppings slowly rolled by as I drove, and I started to notice a strange thing… New Zealand driving distances seem to be off; either that, or the speedometer on the car I was driving was significantly off. I suspect the latter, since its was a rental car, but either way the distance that I was traveling did not pass nearly as quickly as my speed would lead one to expect, and I spent a significantly longer time driving that I expected.

After driving for a few hours I was finally wide awake, just in time to arrive at the town of Taupo. Taupo’s a small touristy town on the edge of the aptly named “Lake Taupo”. What makes the area special are the geothermal vents around the area, and the hotsprings that they feed. As such, my first goal after I parked the car was to figure out where some hotsprings were, so that I could relax in the natural sauna of New Zealand. The i-Site sent me in the right direction, and after a short walk I was relaxing and soaking in a small pool at the side of a large river.

The pool was fed by a stream running out of the hills, in a little waterfall at the far end of the pool. From here, nearly-boiling water heated the pool up, and cold water from the adjacent river helped to regulate the temperature of the pool to a quite lovely level. I wasn’t alone in the pool of course, but thankfully I seem to have a fairly high tolerance to heat, and so I was able to have a small corner all to myself. And thus I spent nearly an hour slowly cooking myself in the pool – sitting in the shade of a tree, my back against a warm rock and the hot stream falling right next to me as I read my book.

On the way back I explored the hot springs park for a quick bit, wanting to stretch out my boiled muscles a bit before sitting back down in the car for the last leg of my trip. I found a thing called a “confidence course”, which appeared to be an amazingly fun obstacle course consisting of 15 or so stations that incorporate strength, climbing, and generally a fear of heights. Pretty much perfectly my thing, and I think I’d like to set one up somewhere, and use it as a timed full-body workout.

Unfortunately I did have to push onwards though, since while I was soaking I had received a few text messages confirming everything about the place I was going to be Couch Surfing for the first few days of my stay in Auckland. First though, I stopped into town and hunted myself down some lunch – Its strange, but until coming to New Zealand I almost never ate sushi, and now I find myself eating it nearly constantly. I don’t know if its just a more integral part of Kiwi culture, sushi shops are more prevalent, or just that Boston doesn’t have many good places to get sushi, but either way I definitely enjoy it, and think that I’ll start making some myself when I get back to the States.

After the above lunch of Sushi and mocha (mocha is the greatest drink ever, FYI) I got back into the car and wandered off onto the main road. It was beautiful, the road was simple, and it was boring. Thats really all there is to say about it – too much of a good thing means that the good thing becomes normal, and normal things start to get boring.

My one distraction on the road from Taupo to Auckland was an encounter with some roadwork. Not a good distraction, you would think – not so for me. You see, I was stuck behind a bus. A bus full of grade-school boys. They looked back, saw me, and flipped me off. In return, I made a funny face straight out of Calvin and Hobbes. They responded in kind, and after less than 30s the entire back window of the bus was full of kids making faces and doing crazy dances while we waiting for the traffic cop to let us pass through. It actually got to the point that I ran out of funny faces to make, had worked through my inventory of horrible disco dance moves, and had started into random fencing moves with my pen… yes. I am a mature man who has a degree in Engineering and has worked for a Top-50 company. But that doesn’t mean I have to act it 😛

What else is there to say of my Great North Island roadtrip? Nothing, to be honest. I arrive in Auckland right when I planned (for once), and me and my Couch Surfing hosts relaxed, chatted, ate some dinner and got to know each other over a glass of wine that I brought as a “thank you for hosting me” present. It was a simple night, where our class was completely at odds with my earlier face-making escapades. Its the dichotomy of my life that I love so much – getting to be completely immature and rediculous one minute, and then sit in an extremely high-class loft apartment drinking wine and discussing international economics the next.

Feb22

The Great North-Island Adventure: A New Zealand Road Trip – Day 2

Posted on by
Standard

It’s finally time – to pack up my bag again and move on from New Zealand. What calls me onward is not a new country, but instead a return to a home that I haven’t seen in months. I would enjoy staying in New Zealand for another six months, but unfortunately a lack of good job options and my non-infinite bank accounts have conspired together, and the clearest course for me is to return home to rest and rebuild my finances before starting out again on another world trip.

For now, what that means is that I am taking my leave of Christchurch. While the city has been amazing to me, I haven’t had the time to see anything of the North Island as of yet, and so I’ve planned out a road trip in order to remedy this.

Day 2

Drizzle… why does it always have to drizzle and spit when I try to sleep out under the stars? Seriously, I love the idea of sleeping out without a tent or anything, but its starting to get silly how often it rains on me just enough to be annoying. I actually ended up moving into the car to sleep off the final bits of the morning when the rain started coming down enough to worry me, which wasn’t nearly as cramped as I expected it to be… but still not anywhere near as comfortable as the nice soft grass I had been in earlier.

After a bit of stretching and popping of joints, I finally roused myself for action. After paying for the campsite I took to the road nearly immediately, not wanting to waste any time that I could be spending exploring the awesome city of Wellington. I had gotten more than a few recommendations on things I should see and places I should go, and so after a quick trip to the i-site to get a city map I started off to find myself something delicious to eat for breakfast/lunch.

And what food there was to be had… Wellington reminds me of the artists section of New York City, in that it’s full of neat creativity and amazing small coffee and lunch shops. While wandering around I saw some amazing murals and art installations, but I think what caught my mind more was the simple Feel of the city; the fact that creativity and invention was simply in the air surrounding you. Forgive my hyperbole; I know that sounds corny, but its the best way to describe what walking around Wellington actually felt like, without actually taking someone there.

After a rather nice little lunch of Nachos (Ed Note: Finally a city with actual fake-Mexican food!) I moved on the the national museum – Te Papa. The outside of the museum was impressive, to say the least, but inside it actually reminded me a huge amount of the Museum of Science back in Boston – A large open center lead out to each of the main exhibits, with amazing shapes and lights peaking out from each of the exhibit halls. My main goal for the museum was to check out two of the biggest shows that Te Papa’s known for – its Colossal Squid and its Earthquake / Maori history.

The squid itself was gigantic and more than a bit intimidating, though it was quite different from the giant squid that I’d seen in the Smithsonian in Washington DC… Colossal Squid are the heaviest squid in the world (that we know of), but Giant Squid are the longest. A small difference it seems, but it means that the Colossal squid is nearly a meter in diameter, ten meters long, and weighing in at nearly 500 kg (over 1100lbs). However, a Giant Squid is nearly 20meters long, while only weighing in at 275kg (600lbs). And yes, I do feel that this information is quite relevant to my roadtrip to Auckland.

The Earthquake and Maori history section of the museum was quite interesting as well, but didn’t really have anything that I hadn’t seen before, so I worked my way through it fairly quickly, wanting to head onwards to my next stop in Wellington – The Weta Cave! Weta is the group that does props and special effects for many of the biggest Holywood movies – notably Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. Since so many people kept coming to their complex asking for tours, the folks at Weta put together “the cave”, or a place to showcase some of their best works and show a short film about what they’ve done and how they do it. I got to see the original statue of Lurtz (the Uruk-Hai Captain from Lord of the Rings), Narsil in its broken state, and many other props from many other movies… And even a few video games as well. The video that they showed was quite interesting as well, and did a great job of showcasing the extent of Weta’s work, and some of the New Zealand film industry too.

After the Weta Cave, I jumped back into the car and got on the highway again, heading up towards the town of Taupo. Most of the way up the highway was just what I had expected – small winding roads traveling through amazing scenery and landscapes. I did have a few fun moments and frightening situations though – I took a turnoff to explore the “Adrenaline Forest”, what I thought was a cool woodland that I could check out. Not so – it was a kids camp. Disappointment.

The rest of the drive was quick and simple, but it took forever. For every kilometer that I had to go, it seemed that I had to drive three or four, and I found myself averaging just about 30kpm… or just about 17mph. On a main highway. I seriously do not understand how that held true, but this evening was just not happening for me. My original plan had been to camp out in Taupo so that I could hit the thermal pools that night, or maybe early in the morning. When 10:00 rolled around and I had been tearing away at the last 100km for an hour, I finally gave up on the fight and pulled off at a picnic spot to set up camp.

At first, it seemed like a near-perfect spot to set up my sleeping pad and just lay out in my sleeping bag. But then the bugs started showing up. I seriously don’t know where they came from, or what they eat when I’m not around, but I found thousands of sandflys literally coating my headlamp and the light in the car. It became so bad that I could barely see the light from the car, there were so many bugs. But it was nearly 11:00 at this point, so I set up the tent in the dark, and somehow was able to keep it out of the bug-radar until I was snugly inside with the screen zipped up and my sleeping bag snuggly around my neck.