Touching down in Auckland was one of the most exciting and refreshing parts of the holiday so far. Not only had we made it most of the way across the world, but it had been relatively stress-free!
We arrived at around 9pm local time, but we were in a taxi and well on our way to accommodation by 10pm (no security, no nothing! - as described in previous posts!).
The next day (Wednesday 8th - local time!), our adventures around Auckland began!
Now, although we were more than excited to have finally reached our country of destination, Auckland is just another big city, in all honesty. There were some things that really entertained us i.e., the green man sign for crossing the road was animated (demonstrating how to cross the road) and the fact that Christmas music was being blared out from shopping centres in 25-degree heat, but otherwise it was pretty easy to navigate, and we were getting more and more excited about moving on to the more 'rural' areas.
On that first full day, we found a shisha bar that was playing the Afghanistan vs. Australia cricket World Cup game. After an hour or two of watching, Googling, and generally trying to figure stuff out, we realised that we really didn't know that much about cricket. It was more impressive the next day when we found out that Australia had managed to come back after Afghanistan's huge lead that we left on, but that's not very interesting considering this blog is supposed to be about travel...
The next day was a little more travel-focused, with us sorting out SIM cards for New Zealand before finding a green outdoor area with beanbags for people to lie on! That kind of thing would never happen in the UK, and we were more than happy to chill out for a bit.
The main drawback of Auckland was that, despite probably being mainly sunny, the majority of buildings are made out of glass, meaning that there was an insane amount of glare in most open spaces and crossings, which made it very hard to find shade, even if you were at the base of a skyscraper...
Also on this day, Matt managed to get his hair cut (finally!) and I got some NZ wool to start a new crotcheting project; we need a new blanket for winter, and now's the best time to start!
As we were there over the weekend (this being the Thursday night), there was a lot of noise at night (we do not want to hear your bass music, thank you very much) but this happened every night we stayed there, so there wasn't much we could do.
On the Friday, we decided to have a mini beach day and walked through the 'posher' areas of Auckland to get to one of the most idyllic (Matt's description!) and quiet beaches I've ever seen in my life. The beachfront was absolutely covered in sea shells, and I would have loved to have taken some if we hadn't had a flight coming up soon!
We took a quick break from the beach to find lunch (in a sweet little restaurant called "Dear Jervois" - Jervois being the street name - before heading back down the very steep hill to do some beach crotcheting and boat watching.
In total, we estimated that we walked around 7 miles and, looking back, we chose the hottest day to do so... but that's just how we seem to end up doing things!
Saturday started with a little bit of a disagreement with the drying machine provided in the hotel (Kiwi International) as it didn't dry anything very well on the first cycle. Luckily though, I had a chat with the front desk and they gave us an additional token to put it through again - no charge. This gave me some time to finish up some work, as well as just chilling out in general after our busy day yesterday.
For lunch, we found an American-style burger place across the road (Fat Puku's Smashed Burgers - would recommend!) and that filled us up nicely for a slow meander around town again. Back to the shisha bar again, and this time it showed some MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) highlights, which we both know a lot more about!
I managed to catch up on watching Drag Race UK that evening through a VPN (NordVPN) which was really good and rounded out the week nicely with something familiar before travelling the next day.
... not that travelling the next day was that hard. The only mini-panic came when we realised at 9:30am that checkout was at 10am, and had a mad rush to be out the room and in the lobby ready to go.
Flying domestic is like riding a bike, except the views were absolutely stunning out the window. I followed along on Google Maps (or whatever had loaded of it) and used the rough lay of the land to figure out where we were and what we could expect to see.
With no passport control when flying domestic, getting through the airport in Christchurch was no issue. The only thing I will say is this: DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN NEAR THE BAGGAGE CLAIM BELT AS THEY MAY GET IN THE WAY... DUH!!!
We got a taxi from the airport easily enough, and we both agreed how nice it was to arrive in the middle of the day (around 3pm) rather than late at night when you can't see anything.
We were at the accommodation just before 4pm (nice enough, but more on that to come!) and rounded out the evening with a walk into central Christchurch to meet up with our friends Harry, Yuri, their baby LJ, and Harry's mum Tania.
It was unbelievably lovely to see some familiar faces, and we wish them all the best on the rest of their trip <3
Looking forward to spending some time in Christchurch, and we can already tell that it's less of a big city than Auckland, making it far more our cup of tea!
- Abi
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