Hello!

We arrived safe and well in Auckland last week. The flight was pretty smooth but arriving in Auckland at 4am in the morning now 13 hours ahead of the UK, was wierd. (In South America we were 4 hours behind!). At the airport in Santiago, we had bumped into 3 Irish girls we had met in Mendoza. They were on the same flight as us and so because we hadn't booked any accomodation in Auckland, we tagged along with them when we got there. When we arrived at Auckland City YHA the guy on the desk was extremely rude. He was really blunt when he told us he had no rooms left and he told us to go to the other YHA down the street. When Neil asked him if he could ring them to check, just to save us dragging all of our bags there for no reason, he said no, it's a five minute walk! So at 5am we were kicked out onto the street of a city we had never seen. And so we arrived at Auckland International YHA who DIDN'T have any mixed rooms so it seemed for a while that we would have to sleep in seperate rooms. The guy then said that he could put us both in an empty male dorm but we'd have to change the next day. We took the latter option. We asked if we could wait in the hostel until we were allowed to check-in but he wouldn't let us so at 5.30am on Wednesday morning, we had to pay for Tues night!

We spent most of our first day in Auckland wandering around the city and finding the supermarket! It's nice to be able to buy food and actually know what it is! This was rare in South America. Auckland is a really nice city without the conjested city atmosphere, it's so quiet yet it is the largest city in Newzealand with something like 1.3 million of Newzealands 4.1 million residents. The rest of the week was pretty uneventful, we didn't want to do too much in Auckland because we were waiting for Rach who arrived last Saturday.

On Saturday morning Neil went to meet Rachel at the airport. I think the flight went better than Rach thought it wa going to go-she was a little bit nervous! We had breakfast when she arrived at the hostel and discussed what we were wanting to do. We decided that buying a car or a campervan was going to be better than getting the bus as it would save on costs, so off we went to the car market. There were a few cars in the market that we liked the look of but we had to be patient because we needed a few days to get hold of enough money! After the market we walked around the harbour and then had lunch in town. Rach tried to stay awake and to be honest did pretty well!

On Sunday morning, we spent a few hours shopping and looking around town. We had heard that there was a Christmas parade being held in the afternoon so after lunch we joined the hundreds of Kiwis by the road side to watch the parade. The weather was really nice and the atmosphere was great although it was strange to be watching a Christmas parade in the sweltering sun! The people involved were mainly kids from societies like dancing and cheerleading, some of the costumes were great. At around 3pm the parade came to an end and the crowds on the street began to leave so we headed towards the Sky Tower. The Sky Tower stands at a whopping 328m and is the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere. We had to get a lift to the top which made our legs turn to jelly (Rach and I anyway!) because when we got in we couldn't see anything and then all of a sudden we were hundreds of meters up with a full view of Auckland! With in seconds we were stood on the observation deck of the Sky Tower with 360 degree views of the city. At certain points on the deck there were glass pannels in the floor. Rach and i didn't dare walk over them as you could see right to the ground. We had a drink in the cafe and watched a few crazy people jumping of the tower from above us before we went back down.