Auckland

 It’s hard to believe that we arrived in Auckland just over one week ago. During our first couple of days in Auckland it felt like we had arrived in the fastest moving and largest city in the world. After settling in we have decided that you probably feel like that about any place you go after French Polynesia. Auckland is not a large city and the traffic is only bad on the highways during rush hour. It reminds me a lot of Portland, Oregon with its downtown parks, tree lined roads and a wonderful variety of restaurants.

We have been spending our nights in a hostel on Queen Street (the main street of downtown Auckland), but our days have been spent wandering around the City and completing paperwork. The first couple of days were spent exploring Queen Street from top to bottom. At the bottom of Queen Street (the north end) is the harbor and we spent some time sitting on the wharf watching the sailboats dodge the cruise ships. Upper Queen Street (the south end) is full of restaurants. We ate one of our dinners at a French restaurant and left our passports there which cause a mild panic the next morning before we went back to the restaurant and retrieved them.

Our first long walk off of Queen Street was to Auckland Domain, a park to the south of downtown Auckland. In the park we visited the Wintergardens and the museum. The Wintergardens have a fernery attached to them which contains a wide variety of the ferns that grow in New Zealand including some that are as big as a small tree. It gave us a good idea why the silver fern is used in many of the national symbols of New Zeland. The museum includes cultural history, natural history and war memorials but we were only able to make it through the first two floors which were the cultural history and natural history portions of the museum. The next day we took another long hike up to Mt Eden, the highest volcano within Auckland City. From the top of Mt Eden we had a spectacular view of downtown Auckland and enjoyed basking in the sun of a warm fall day. We took the long way back from Mt Eden and grabbed meat pies from one of the wonderful eateries along Ponsonby Road.

On Sunday we got serious about buying a car and walked to Ellerslie Racecourse where the Auckland car fair was being held. We found a car that we really liked and arranged for a pre-purchase inspection to be done the next day. A really nice mechanic did the inspection the next day and informed us that the car hadn’t been serviced regularly and had a number of problems so we ended up not getting the car. It felt like we had wasted two days and we were frustrated that we were still in Auckland with no clear way of making it out of the city. Today we went to a used car dealer and found a car that had been owned by a car rental company. It turns out that in New Zealand cars owned by car rental companies are subject to stricter commercial standards and are supposedly serviced on a regular basis. We bought the car so here’s hoping that it’s true. The car isn’t much to look at, but hopefully it will get us around the country without too many problems.

This evening we also found our first farmstay host. They live 35 minutes northwest of downtown Auckland on a sheep and beef ranch. We will head out there tomorrow morning and find out what kind of work we will be doing for the next week or two.