Auckland

Well we arrived in Auckland at about 6am and I rang the hostel to make sure my booking had gone through ok. It hadn’t. Butts Galore. So we booked again, and decided to hang out in the airport until it was time to check in. We had some McDonalds brekkie and I had my first airport shower – free & easy. Warm water & lots of it. Fanfuckingtastic.

Then we got into a shuttle with a very nice & slightly mad Kiwi driver who gave us a mini tour (as they all do I’ve since found out) and some history of the areas we were going through. I, of course, knew it all – for I had the ROUGH GUIDE. He he.

Our hostel was pretty cool, even if the cheapest room had no windows. We dumped our stuff & headed out to strut the streets. We went down to the port, tramped up & down Queen Street (the big shopping street) and headed to the art museum. Then we had a cheapo lunch of tofu & rice and decided to hit Happy Hour. We got the drinks in, piled all our New Zealand brochures, guides, discount coupons & millions of other pamphlets onto the table and started to try make a bit of sense out of it all.
We finally emerged with a semi-plan. We would get a flexipass bus ticket (allows you to buy blocks of hours and use them up on whatever routes you like) and do a bit of the north island, then do the west coast of the south island (the east coast is flooded) and then fly back from Queenstown to Auckland to catch Danny Howells play on the 12th. Then we would have another then days or so to do the northland, lake Taupo & a bit of the Coromandel Range. Easy Peasy lemon Squeezy.

The next day was bloody Anzac day (kinda like veteran’s day) so everywhere was closed. We managed to grab some brekkie in the one open café and decided to do a bit of track work & do some laundry. Later on (about 1pm) things opened for a while and we went to Skycity to watch people jump off the top of the 328m tower. He he. Then we decided to go for lunch (around 2pm) only it took us (for us see James) so long to decide what we wanted to eat (and also it had to fit into the category of under 10 dollars [each not between us that would be a bit too crzy]) that by the time we found somewhere ‘suitable’, it was feckin 5.30pm. Crazy Irish.

Anywho, we hit happy hour again and finished up our much more important decision making. Then we headed to the Internet café to book some bus trips for the next couple of days.

^nice pic!! Hooter Rowlando