Auckland & Start of road trip

We landed in Auckland at 8 in the evening and very rapidly acclimatized to the winter weather as it was bucketing it down. We had a slight delay as we didn't have our onward itinerary and had to wait at one side for 20 minutes until the man from immigration was happy that we actually intended to leave the country and had a departing flight booked.After we cleared all that up, it was out into the rain and a new country. We had travelled with a girl that was on the Oz bus and arranged to meet her in town after we got to our respective hostels for a drink and a bite to eat. This is where we first realized that New Zealand is not like home…or Australia even. After meeting Kerry, we traipsed down the main street in Auckland looking for a small restaurant or bar that still did food and we drew a blank. There was nowhere that was open, and this was at the ungodly hour of 9.30pm. Eventually we gave up, had a Wendy's burger and headed back to the hostel for a rest.

We had done very little research on New Zealand compare to a lot of our other destinations so we planned to spend the first 3 days in Auckland to get our bearings and decided exactly how we would arrange the next 6 weeks.AS a result, our bedroom rapidly began to look like a travel agent as just about every leaflet and flyer from the tourist information booth was collected and read until we settled on our plan to drive ourselves round the north island and down south a bit, before getting some sort of organized transport for the far south where the weather would be too cold and the roads a bit dodgy in the bad weather. Once that was decided, it was time to see a bit of Auckland. Despite not being the capital of New Zealand, Auckland is by far the largest city. It has a population of 1.75 million people in a country of just over 4 million. It is a big place and is quite sprawling which means that when you are in the heart of it, it doesn't really feel like a big city at all. In fact, I was quite disappointed with Auckland; it seems to lack that buzz that most large cities have. It does however have 1 large focal point, which is the Sky Tower. This huge building dominates the Auckland skyline and is 328m tall. It's the largest tower in the southern hemisphere and the 12th largest free standing structure in the world.Below it is a large casino, entertainment complex and shopping mall. So it is definitely in the heart of the city. You can also throw yourself off it if you are daft enough and that was something I fully intended to do.

The landscape around Auckland is very mountainous and the whole area is a series of volcanoes, both active and dormant. The largest of which is on the opposite end of the bay and called Mt Victoria. There is a nice town at the base of Mt Victoria called Devonport and this makes a lovely day trip from the city centre. We got the ferry from the Britomart terminal which is very basic and needs some real work to liven it up. They seem to be regenerating a lot of that area, but after seeing circular quay in Sydney, this looked a bit 2nd rate in comparison. The ferry took us to Devonport and we spend a few hours wandering through the town and climbed to the top of Mt Victoria. (Not really hard, there is a road all the way up)The views from the top here are great and you can see the working harbours on either end of Auckland city as well as a large number of islands around the bay that were former volcanoes.After all that work sightseeing, we decided it was time for a quick drink and to see what the Guinness was like in New Zealand. We headed out of town slightly to a suburb called Parnell, and a pub called The Bog. As we had only picked it for the name, we were pleasantly surprised to find that its actually a cracking little pub and as the NZ vs. S.Africa rugby match was on, we decided to stay there for a few hours. Parnell itself is also a nice place and we learnt that Auckland has a number of residential suburbs like that where most people socialize. The centre of town isn't really the big social gathering like we had expected and most people stick to their own location where the bar and restaurant scene is thriving.

The next day being Sunday, we decided to head for Mass with our sore heads and went to St Patrick's cathedral in the centre of town. This was a really nice church, but is easily the smallest cathedral I think I have ever been to.As a comparison, it's roughly the same size as Mary Magdalene's church in Willesden but much nicer. There was 1 major difference during the mass though which caught us out, they changed the words of the Our Father. Replacing trespasses with sins, and changed "lead us not into temptation" to"and in this time of trial" This confused me as if there is one thing that wouldn't change across churches you would expect that it would be the Our Father. We left the church slightly confused, and had obviously looked like tourists as the priest thanked us for attending and wished us well on our travels as we left!!!

Monday was our last day in Auckland after spending a few days procrastinating; we really tried to squeeze a few things in today. We started with a trip to Auckland museum, which by a quirk of fate is also the Anzac memorial in Auckland. Emma was not impressed, hoping that my fascination had passed once we left Australia. The museum itself was quite good and has a large focus on Maori history and culture. They also do quite a good cultural show designed to introduce you to traditional Maori culture, dance and song which we went to see. Having spent a few hours in the museum filling ourselves with culture, it was time to indulge in another traditional NZ custom…throwing yourself off large objects!!I had decided to do the Sky Jump, which is a 192m leap from just above the observation level of the SkyTower.This isn't like a bungy jump as the cord is tied to your back so as you fall, you are parallel to the ground much like a base jump or skydive. It uses a system called a fan descent which means that as I fall, the cable pulls a fan which generates resistance and slows me down as I get near to the ground. If all that sounds fairly straightforward, let me tell you that at 192m in the air, my faith in the science and technology was about as shaky as my knees were!

I was absolutely bricking it at the top, and all the while the girl strapping me to the safety equipment was rabbi ting away like we were just chatting at the bus stop. When it came time to jump, you just lean forward and fall off…..which was actually surprisingly easy-it probably helped that I closed my eyes at this point.Almost as soon as you jump, you are suddenly brought to a halt 10m down so that they can take a photo of you!!!!Whilst it's a bit jarring at that point, I found that it really helped as by stopping I had to open my eyes, look around me and take it all in. This meant that once the brakes were released and I started to fall, I was able to fully take it in. All I can say is that its an amazing feeling simply dropping out of the sky like that and as I landed the rush was great……it got even better as the person at the bottom said that as it was a quite day, I would be allowed another go for free if I wanted it. (Their best marketing is people doing the jump so on quiet days they often do 2 rides for the price of 1)I was definitely up for that and this time, there was no closing my eyes, no stopping at 10metres and the ride was much faster on thee way down. Brilliant experience and I can't wait to try the bungy at Queenstown.We had planned to meet my cousin Mark at the Skytower after the jump but luckily enough he turned up as the 1st jump finished and watched the 2nd one.

We wandered around the city for a little while trying to decide what to do, however eventually we succumbed to the inevitable and headed for a pub as it had started to rain. We went to the Muddy Farmer, a fairly large Irish pub which was an enjoyable place to spend a few hours sat by their open fire.The next morning, we set off and collected our transport for the next 3 weeks….a campervan.We hired our van form a company called Jucy that does all sorts of vans for travelers. We got a reasonably big one with a shower and toilet in as we had planned to spend most nights just winging it for somewhere to stay. We had worked out a tentative schedule which was basically to go all the way to the top of the north island, then work our way back down and get into the south island down to Christchurch. Not exactly rocket science at this point and we would work out exactly where to go as we moved around. We had a few points of reference to help guide us on our journey. As well as the ubiquitous Lonely Planet, we had lots of tourist brochures, the route that Billy Connolly did on his tour of NZ and the 101 things to see for Kiwi's. Between the lot of them we would find something to do over the next few weeks.

The first thing to do was get used to the van and our first destination was just outside of Auckland, a place called Kelly Tarltons. It is a cross between an aquarium and a polar exploration exhibit. There was lots of stuff about Capt Scott and Shackleton as well as an indoor penguin colony which was a lot of fun to see. They also had some shows including divers feeding the sharks and a woman feeding stingrays. They also let certified divers feed the sharks but it was a bit pricey for us after all this travelling. Besides, if I dive with a shark, I want it to be a surprise. After wandering around there for a while, we set off for the open road and tried to find somewhere to stop for the night.Getting out of Auckland is harder than you think, unlike staples corner, there are no big signs saying "The North" so it took us a little while to actually work out where we were going but after a while we eventually headed off into the sunset.