well i’m on my way…

I made it to the train station early this morning, and it’s a good thing I was.  The train signals were messed up somewhere between the stop prior to Auckland and Auckland.  The Overlander passengers (myself included) had to wait an hour before a bus came to take us to the train.  There was one very soft spoken employee explaining the problem, and it became more of a problem because there was only one of him and many disgruntled passengers.  When we arrived at the train, many people pushed and shoved to get to the front so they could check in.  Some other people, including myself, stood back and let them fight:  the train wasn’t going anywhere without all the passnegers, and if we were already an hour late, what’s another 30 minutes?

I somehow managed to fall in and out of sleep most of the day, with one 2 hour stint in there as well.  I brought with me two apples and five muesli (granola) bars, hopefully enough to tide me over for the day.  The train left Auckland at 830 am(an hour late) and was originally due to arrive in Wellington, the capital city, at 730 pm(which we only ended up being 15 minutes late for).  By the time we got to Wellington I was famished.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The scenery was beautiful.  No, I take that back.  It’s stunning.  And this is the North Island.  The South Island is supposed to be better.  Having read most of the entire trilogy of the Lord of the Rings, including The Hobbit, I can see why the director chose New Zealand to film these based on this train journey alone.  The lush forest and palm covered hills and mountains really play with the imagination.  I’ve heard that New Zealand’s scenery is comparable to Ireland’s.  I can see where the person was coming from, but they forgot to mention that New Zealand would be Ireland on steriods.  Where Ireland has hillls, NZ has mountains.  Where Ireland has valleys, NZ has rivers cutting through the forests.  Ireland has lots of cows and sheep, it’s a given.  But New Zealand has to have that amount times 1000.  OK, I’m exaggerating.  But you get the picture, that is, if you’ve been to Ireland, but most of my readers from home have. 

We arrived in Auckland 15 minutes behind schedule, how I’m not sure, since the train seemed to be going very slow.  I found a map outside the train station, located the street my hostel was on, and headed in some direction.  Feeling stubborn, I decided not to take out my map, and of course got lost.  Or a little off track as I prefer to say.  I asked a cab driver and he gave me so crazy directions, I’m sure to confuse me so I’d get in his car.  He failed and I headed off in the direction he pointed me in.  I stopped in Subway since I was famished and asked the sandwich artist-he didn’t know.  I unwillingly busted out my Lonely Planet in the middle of the mall and tore out the map (why those pages aren’t perforated I’ll never know) and found out I was heading in the wrong direction. 

I got to my hostel, dumped my bag on the ground, claimed my bed, and headed back out to walk around Wellington.  It’s a bar and cafe town, and it being Thursday the places were already overflowing.  I walked for a few hours, just following the lights, probably in circles, not wanting to go in anywhere since I felt and looked like crap from sitting on the train all day, and was not about to walk into a bar by myself…I headed back to the hostel around midnight and went straight to sleep.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under New Zealand. 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.