Bonjour-Mundo!

We’ve made it to Kiwi Land! Currently we’re residing in Rotoura, New Zealand, which smells like rotten eggs. However, our trip began in the City Of Sails, also known as Auckland.

Our trip from Thailand to New Zealand was uneventful, but insanely long. We started out in the ugly transit town of Surat Thani, Thailand, where had arrived the previous day by ferry, flew to Bangkok, waited in Bangkok airport for 8 hours, then from Bangkok to Sydney, Sydney to Auckland. All in all, we were probably travelling for about 28 hours. Needless to say, we spent our first evening in New Zealand snugly tucked in our beds. Our long flights though were awesome, props to Emirates Airlines, they measured up to the competion of Qatar. Both airlines kick US airlines butts any day. I couldn’t complain about the 5 course meals we got to chose off a menu, free wine and liquers, hot terry cloth towels, personal video systems with millions of movies, tv shows, video games (that you could play against other passengers!…seriously alex, you missed out, I was sad I couldn’t beat you, if only they had mario kart. 😉 ) , they also had a two cameras, one mounted to show you the view from the cockpit and the other below the plane. Pretty cool for take-off and landing.

Back to New Zealand. So far, I really like the place. In auckland it felt like a nice fall day outside, refreshing after the steaming Thai sun. We got mostly sunshine which was nice, just a few sunshowers that led to great rainbows. Some places had leaves falling from the trees, yet you could walk around the corner and there would be a palm tree, very odd. But Auckland overall I thought was a great city. It’s got the big city feel downtown, lots of big buildings and rush of people, but a 10 minutes walk and you’ve got a charming little suburb town with cute little shops and great restaurants. Walk out a bit from the center of downtown and you face the harbor full to the brim with fancy sailboats.

The first afternoon we made our way up the Sky Tower, kind of a space needle type building in downtown. From the top you can see all over and around auckland, beautiful views of the surrouding countryside, harbor bridge, and islands in the bay. You can tell New Zealand is the adventure capital though, at least twice while we were in the tower, people bungy jumped right off the top!

The second day we took a ferry out to the suburb of Devonport. Really charming town. Lots of cute little shops and cafes, and we hiked up two big hillsides (once volcanoes apparently some hundred thousand years ago) for great views of Auckland and could just sit and watch all the sailboats on the water. Super blue bay, just gorgeous.

 We’ve been looking to catch some world cup action here, but unforunately none yet, just lots and lots of rugby!! The people here are crazy about their rugby.

That’s right folks, it’s said you’re supposed to do something everyday that scares you, so for a day in Ko Tao, I did exactly that. Swam with the sharks!

As I said in the previous post, Ko Tao is known for having some of the best diving in all south east asia, and Em and I decided to experience what it had to offer. Since neither of us have our PADI certification, we were only able to snorkle, but it was well worth it. (PS, if you ever want to get certified, and have a few days, I’d recommend Ko Tao. The island has mountains upon moutains of scuba certification schools, apparently dirt cheap compared to what they are in the states. If we had had more time, I might have done it.)

We booked ourselves for a day long snorkle trip through a store around the block from our hostel. It picked us up in the morning and we didn’t get back until late afternoon. In the trip we got to see all around the island, and were dropped off to snorkel in about 6 or 7 different bays, it was awesome. The fish and the coral were absolutely breathtaking. So many millions of colors, shapes and sized. The water was crystal clear, it was almost as if you were floating on top of an aquarium…which I suppose in a way you really are. You could reach out and almost touch them. Bright yellow, electric neon colors, some that one girl described as rainbow sherbert, all sorts of different colors mixed together. Big ones, small ones, thousands of little ones in a school forming all sorts of shapes as they moved, I swear it looked to be right out of a movie like Finding Nemo. Little shiny ones that looked like a downpour of silver confettii. I was endlessly impressed. At the end of the day we also visited a little collection of three islets, now used primarily as a dive resort. Also really stunning.

And, yes, in one of the bays, black tip reef sharks! I was pretty scared to jump in, but once I actually saw one, I found myself wanting to follow it all through the reef. The bay the sharks were in was quite deep, the sharks swimming down on the bottom and snorkelers floating on the top. The sharks didn’t even pay us any notice. Oh, and just so you all don’t think I’m really super brave…they were little ones, of the three I saw, the biggest might have been about 3 feet, but hey, they’re still sharks!

Sorry it's been quite awhile since I've checked in to update the blog...but now that internet is free, I've got a bit of a chance to catch things up. Oh, and for some reason this hostel has macs, and it ... [Continue reading this entry]