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.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.