Awesome Auckland

Well it’s been over 5 years since I last posted here, just a wee bit overdue.  I’ve been spending my summers at the Freedom Flight Park in Lumby teaching paragliding and hang gliding and taking people on tandem paragliding flights.  For part of the winter my job is tandem paragliding but from the ski hill in Revelstoke (paraskiing!).  However, between mid-October to February the weather is not good for any of these activities, so it is my time to travel.  This year I have decided to visit the land of Hobbits and small funny birds: New Zealand.

I flew from Kelowna to Vancouver, down to Los Angeles and then on to Auckland.  The final 12½ hour marathon flight wasn’t actually that bad.  I was quite impressed with Air New Zealand.  It was a new Boeing 777 plane and even though I was near the back in cattle class, there was still plenty of legroom, lots to watch on the seatback TV and the crew were great.  The captain’s announcements had me giggling as he joked that we’d be flying higher than the seagulls but lower than the satellites, along with other quips.

Arriving early in the morning I didn’t find the jetlag bad at all as the time change is only 4 hours from BC. Well technically it is 20 hours ahead so I missed a whole day on the calendar but the body doesn’t care about that.  The hostel I had booked, TMACS (an acronym that no one who worked there knew what it stood for) was clean, new and well located in the CBD, the Central Business District.  What I really liked were the bunkbeds.  They were solid, wooden beds sporting a light and USB charging plug-in right by your head and to top it all off you had a pull down blind that turned your bed into your own tiny little room!

It wasn’t a shocker but of course I was the oldest or maybe second oldest staying at the hostel but that didn’t bother me.  It is interesting to stay in hostels now compared to when I backpacked through Europe after university in the mid 90s as there isn’t as much of a need to socialize if you don’t want to.  Half the people would be staring at their phones in the lounge and the kitchen, oblivious to what was going on around them.  Having a smart phone takes a lot of the challenge out of backpacking in a foreign land too as it’s so easy to find your way around the city and determine what you want to see.

The easiest thing to see in the city definitely didn’t require the use of a smart device.  The SkyTower loomed over you everywhere.  Standing 328 meters high and built to withstand 200 km/h winds and an 8.0 earthquake within 20 kilometers, it is the tallest freestanding structure in the southern hemisphere and the 25^th highest tower in the world.  Shaped similarly to the CN tower, it definitely helped with navigating around the city.  On the first day as I walked around town to familiarize myself with the area, I watched as a person plummeted to the ground from the observation deck.  Don’t worry, it wasn’t a suicide, it’s known as the SkyJump and they were connected by a couple of cables.  I found out later that it is 11 seconds of adrenaline as you fall to the ground at a max speed of 85 km/h.  I visited the tower a few days later and did contemplate the SkyJump but decided that might wait until the end of the trip.

The SkyJump:

See the little blue square at the base in the shadow?  That's where he landed.

Don't worry, it's thick glass.

This is the top of the convention centre.  It was ablaze up until the day before I got here.  I guess an 18 year old worker left his blowtorch on as he went for a smoke break...well he got a bigger smoke break than he expected!

Downtown:

The inner harbour:

Looking around:

Random strange beer case...with the Killer Guinea Pig!

On my second day, I headed to the Auckland City Car fair, a weekly event.  From my research the Ellerslie car fair on Sunday morning was the predominant venue for purchasing a vehicle but I figured I should hit both of them.  I had been watching a Facebook group for buying and selling camperized vans and immediately recognized a few of them.  I chatted with some of the vendors, most of them young Europeans, and after checking out some vans I quickly realized that a regular van with a low roof just wasn’t going to cut it for me, I need a high top primarily thanks to my lower back injuries I have sustained from paragliding. 

One van caught my attention as it was not only a high top but had an extended wheelbase.  The seller turned out to not be a backpacker but a local who did this as a profession and he was a fine-tuned salesman.  Jimmy had a few vehicles at the fair for sale but this was the primo one, albeit not quite finished yet.  It still needed flooring and some other last minute details to be completed.  I chatted with Jimmy for 15 minutes or so then continued on to see the rest of the stock in the lot.  Nothing compared.  I wandered back and he probably could tell that he had a bite on the hook. 

We went for a test drive and it seemed solid.  Jimmy drove at first then let me take over.  That was when I pulled a “granddad”, not once or twice but 3 or 4 times.  What I mean is that my grandfather in England used to have a couple of cars and one of them had the indicator on the right side of the steering wheel and the other car had it on the left.  So occasionally when he wanted to turn, all of a sudden the windshield wipers squeaked across a dry windshield on a sunny day.  We knew that he wanted to turn but no one else did!  Well in New Zealand the cars have the indicator switch on the right whereas we have them on the left in Canada…so I pulled a granddad multiple times and had to chuckle about it.

Returning to the lot, there happened to be a mechanic inspecting out a vehicle for someone else so I had him take this vehicle for a test drive and perform an inspection.  Everything checked out and after a bit of haggling (which is not my forte), I was the new owner of a 2002 Toyota Hiace van, a common and sought after vehicle in this land.  It would be ready on Wednesday which was perfect as I had booked the hostel until then.

After sealing the deal on my new home on wheels, I ventured over to the Auckland War Memorial Museum.  It’s set in the Auckland Domain which is the largest park in the CBD and sitting up on a hill it has a lovely view of the surrounding area.  It turns out that it also contains a natural history section and another dedicated to the Maoris.  That is something that has struck me in the short time I’ve been in NZ, they have really embraced and are proud to promote the Maori history of the islands.  Most names of towns are Maori names.  Almost everything is in both languages, Maori and English and often Maori comes first.  One of the most impressive things I saw in the museum was a Maori war canoe that could fit 100 warriors!

The massive 100 warrior canoe:

Guess who's ice axe...yup, Sir Edmund Hillary's, the first to summit Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953.

That's a reproduction of a skeleton of a Moa, an extinct wingless bird that stood 3.6 meters tall!

An original Spitfire:

Yet another nice view of the SkyTower from near the museum:

The following day I wandered down to the inner harbour area.  I was quite impressed with the vibrant activity going on there.  I guess it helped that it was a sunny warm spring day with many restaurants filled with people enjoying food and drinks on their patios, others walking about and even a covered marquee with some traditional Maori dancers and drummers entertaining the crowd.  I thought it was cool that I saw a few little trailers that were “water stations” with a fountain and a couple of taps to refill bottles and also free sunscreen!  Great idea.

The ubiquitous SkyTower: 

Yes that is a BIG sailboat!

The drummers and dancers:

The water station:

The revitalized harbour:

Day 4 I was a little slower getting out of the hostel but eventually decided to walk to Mount Eden, a dormant volcano with a summit 196 meters above sea level.  It sports a cool bowl-like crater at the top which is 50 meters deep and covered in grass.  You’re not allowed to go down into the bowl which is just as well as it looks like it would be difficult to climb back out.

Auckland is a pretty cool city, with 1.6 million of the 5 million Kiwis inhabiting it but it is a big city and that’s not my thing…it’s time to move on and see more of this amazing country.  It’s time to pick up my new ride!