Oct 3 - 5

Auckland is great. There is so much to do here. There are also 3 or 4 people in the same room as me at any given time. Both of these things make it a little difficult to spend enough time on a computer to write a well thought out blog post. Everyone is pretty much sleeping right now, so I’ll try to quickly sum up the past few days.

After an hour bus ride from downtown Los Angeles to LAX airport, a 5 hour wait at the airport, a 13 hour flight, and 2 hours spent taking a series of buses from the airport into Auckland, I finally made it to my host’s house.

I’m really glad I used some of my spare time at the Los Angeles airport to figure out the Auckland bus system, because even with all that planning it was still pretty confusing once I got here. Luckily the bus drivers (and everyone else) here are friendly and helpful. I’ve gotten the hang of it now. I got a map and it only took a few days to be familiar with the main street names and areas of town. It turns out that traveling around Auckland by bus is actually really simple - but can be a pain on the weekends when buses run very infrequently.

Anyway, when I initially emailed Jaime from Couchsurfing to see if I could stay, I wrote a pretty long message explaining how long I planned to stay, why I’d like to meet him and his roommates, etc. He sent me a very brief message back saying something like “Should be cool. Show up anytime after 9am. Here’s my address.” I was a little wary of just showing up at his door, but I figured I’d try since he did give me his address. Once I made it to his house, I was greeted by several different people. I thought they were roommates, but apparently they were also couchsurfers. Of the couchsurfers, there are Roman from France, Nico from Germany, and Shelley from Seattle who’s about to go work on a farm in NZ for 6 months. Another couchsurfer just arrived today, but I didn’t catch his name because he was pretty much sleeping when we got home. It’s basically like a mini hostel here. Jamie, Paul, Emma, David, and Mark are the roommates and they seem to host someone new every week. Their place is amazing - it’s really close to the grocery store and some other shops, the bus into town is at the end of the street, they have a tree house, a hot tub, a hammock, some swings, a ping pong table, a blow dart board, a bamboo forest, and lots of different couches and lounging places. This will be my 3rd night here and I’ve slept on a different couch each night.

My first day in Auckland, Shelley and I went to Cornwall Park and hiked up One Tree Hill. One Tree Hill is a volcanic peak in Auckland with a great view of the city. It’s like a little oasis in the middle of the suburb craziness. There’s lots of loud traffic and chain restaurants wrappped around the base of the volcano, but once you get inside the park you forget it’s all there. Instead, all you see are huge grassy meadows, giant knobby trees of all different types, rabbits, quails, parrots, mice, and sheep. Because it’s spring, all the animals here seem to be having babies. And you can just hop right over the fences (that are only meant to keep the sheep from getting into the road, but not meant to keep the people out from walking up to the peak). I thought this place was great. We spent hours wandering around and taking pictures.

The second day, we planned to go to Rangitoto, another volcanic island in Auckland. But public transportation in NZ doesn’t seem to run very frequently - especially on Saturday. We didn’t really realize this, but when we finally got to the ferry station at 1:15, the last ferry to that island had just left. We then decided to go to Waiheke Island, but we’d have to wait an hour for that ferry….so we chose Devonport instead. It was only a 12 minute ferry - not very adventurous, but fun. We rented bikes and rode to Cheltenham Beach, to some side streets with pretty houses and gardens, and to North Head, a historic site with lots of tunnels and forts built during the late 1800s when Auckland feared an attack by Russia.

Today was a little slow going. I came to the realization that a lot of my time will have to be spent planning and figuring out transportation. I spent the morning comparing bus rates to Taupo, looking at hostels, and figuring out transportation to and from the Tongariro Crossing (which I hope to do in the next few days if the weather is nice enough). I finally booked a hostel for 2 nights in Taupo and I leave Auckland tomorrow at 1pm. After all that stuff was figured out, Shelley and I took the bus into town. I bought some cheap gloves from a thrift store and visited the Cruelty Free Shop (a small 100% vegan store on K Road.)

After stocking up on nutritional yeast and buying a few things to make breakfast for my hosts tomorrow, we headed to The Loft, a Hare Krishna yoga center that a fellow vegan who I met online through couchsurfing told me about. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was told they had $4 vegan meals, singing and dancing….so I figured I better check it out. The whole thing was very long. I loved the singing and dancing part, but I probably could have done without the long powerpoint presentation about coping with stress. Once the dinner started (which was awesome), I glanced around and saw a few people I recognized. Funny when those small world moments happen. We saw Sara, a girl who offered to host me in Auckland if my plans with the other people fell through. She’s from Belgium and doing an internship in New Zealand with Amnesty International. She brought her roommates (Craig and Fraser) and Cassie, the girl they’re currently hosting. Cassie’s from Australia and will be in New Zealand for a few months working for Green Peace. We saw that Nico, one of the couchsurfers staying with us the first night, was also there. Apparently he was walking around downtown without shoes and a woman suggested that he go eat cheap food at the Hare Krishna place. We even saw some dude from the bus stop earlier that day. We all sat in a big circle with some other people from the center. Turns out that The Loft is a happening place to be on a Sunday evening.

Then we all took off to The Vegas Nightclub.

haha. Just kidding!

Some notes:

• People here are endlessly amused by us and the fact that we’re from America. We went to buy beer one night and the woman at the supermarket started laughing hysterically when she saw our foreign IDs. She looked at mine and said “Whoa, Texas! hahahaha.” Then she looked at Shelley’s id and said “hahaha. Washington.” It took her a few minutes to compose herself before she could sell us our beer. When we were waiting at the bus stop, we met some giggly 17 year old girls who just came back from going shopping. They asked us a series of questions (like whether or not we watch Laguna Beach) and they got really giddy anytime we spoke. “You’re accents are sooooo cool,” they said. “Ours are soooo boring.”

It’s a little sad to leave such a cozy house, but I obviously have to move on. Tomorrow I’ll be in Taupo.

Posted on October 5th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: New Zealand