It's A Long Way To Pukehina ...

Friday was our first transit day. We were off to our cottage rental (or "Bach" as they call them here) in Pukehina beach. Here are a few shots of the apartment in Auckland after we cleaned up after ourselves without all of our crap strewn all over the place.




After consulting the DETAILED maps, we found the simplest route out of town and after packing up the rental car set off. The trip out of Auckland was direct and made without navigational interruptions. Once on the highways, how far wrong can you go if your route from one town to the other is literally follow Highway 1 to Highway 2 and take that until you get there. We found the drivers on the 4 lane limited access highways to be much better behaved than the in-town drivers. The drive out of Auckland and down through the countryside was pleasant and uneventful.

Once on Highway 2, the road narrowed down to 2 lane blacktop. The driving on these roads is a little harrowing. They have these signs up along the road calling out for "No More JAFA's", JAFA standing for Just Another Fatal Accident. One idea to accomplish that would be to reduce the speed limit down from 100 km/hr and smooth out some of those hairpin turns. And a few more passing lanes might help.

Highway 2 is the main road leading from the expressway out to the Coromandel peninsula where a great number of Auckland residents have cottages. Imagine if you will, the type of people who regularly speed up Hwy 400 out of Toronto instead stuck on a windy 2 lane road with little opportunity to pass. Carnage would reign, as it apparently does here on Hwy 2.

Thankfully for us, traffic was fairly light, and we had a fun (for me - read "Alarming" for Debbie) drive zooming around the twists and turns leading through the short mountains. We stopped at a picnic spot and took a pic to give you an idea of the drive. The road twists around to the left at the end of the gorge.


We stopped in Tauranga, a fairly large (for NZ) harbour city, for lunch. Here is the daily cafe shot.


The sky clouded over as we stopped, and as we drove out of Tauranga, the rain began to fall. For the rest of the drive, about 30 minutes or so, a light rain fell. As we drove into Pukehina Beach (more on Pukehina another day) the rain upgraded to serious downfall. We found the home of the Real Estate agent who was supposed to deliver us our keys, and after a few minutes in the pouring rain knocking on her door, we gave up and went in search of a dry place to wait.

We found the local Pub/Restaurant/Convenience Store/Beer/Wine Store (it's a very small place) and settled in for a wait. The locals in the pub were friendly and the bartender let us use his phone to periodically check to see if the Real Estate agent was in. After an hour and a half, we read the documents a little closer and found she had a cell phone number. In NZ a cell phone is a long distance call, and our friendly bartender drew the line at that, so we headed out in the rain again to find a phone booth.

By this time, the rain had upgraded to torrential, so we were soaked by the time we got to the car. The one and only phone booth in Pukehina Beach is located at the small convenience store (the only other business in town) directly across the street from our rental. I tried the phone card we bought in Auckland, and could not make it work, although this may have been the fault of the operator, as the phone's LCD display had been vandalized and was mostly illegible.

I went through the falling sheets of water into the convenience store, and bought a local phone card. By the time I returned to the phone booth, the schoolbus had pulled up and a teenager had established himself on the phone. We waited in the car for quite a while and finally got fed up and drove back out to the highway and along it until we found a gas station. There, I was finally able to call the agent's cell phone, and using every bit of patience I had left informed her we were looking for the key.

She asked if I had checked her mailbox as instructed? I checked the sheets I had, and there, under her phone number, were instructions to the effect that if she wasn't home, to get the key out of her mailbox. With an embarrased thanks, I hung up and we drove back through the driving rain to pick up the key.

When we got to the cottage, the rain had increased from torrential to the next level for which a word has yet to be invented as far as I know. A single trip from the car to the door caused one to be soaked through.

Once we had done the several trips to unload our now mostly wet luggage and supplies, we spent some time unpacking and laying things out to dry. Debbie put on her bathing suit and in a short lull in the downpour, walked town to dabble her feet in the ocean.



We fiddled around for a while, then with dry clothing on headed through another lull to the restaurant for a decent dinner and came back for a few hours of TV before we went to bed, surprisingly exhausted. The heavy rains continued all evening and most of the night.

We are very happy with the cottage which is quite beautiful and has some architectural details that are quite impressive. I'll talk more about that another day. I'll finish off with a picture of one our co-inhabitants here.


We're out of direct internet range, so updates will be more sporadic for the next while. I'm currently updating at an Internet Cafe in Te Puke (Pronounced Teh Pook Eh) which is about 20 minutes from our cottage. Until that time ...

Don

Auckland Day 2

Thursday dawned bright and sunny. We decided to go to "Mount Eden", a tall hill in the middle of Auckland they have set up as a viewing site. This adventure would also offer up a little more practice driving, although the navigation turned out to be our weakness.

After checking our maps twice we set out for Mt. Eden. The trip there was surprisingly straightforward and we arrived in good time. The hill looks pretty unassuming as you approach, but the drive up is fairly steep and the road is narrow, perched on the edge of a steep drop. A large parking area is in place at the top with room for many cars and buses.

We parked and were surprised at how high we were and how complete the view was. Here are a few shots we took at the top.



Here is a more Art-y shot of Debbie.


I took a panorama of the city side, but my panorama software is acting up, so I'll have to wait to try to fix it up when we get home. Here is the best I could do. This is looking east of downtown.


There is a large round bronze plate which has the compass directions and also the names of various cities and towns with the names printed pointing in the direction of that place.


For you S/W Ontario folks, you will be interested to know that Toronto is 11 km farther away from here than is Washington DC.


We then set out to visit Karangahape Road, a street of "Funky" shops says the guide book. The night before we had taken the Auckland map up to our room to do some planning and we used it to plot our way to Mt. Eden. When we got to the car, but before we left the apartment building, we realized we had forgotten the map, but we found one of those "Tourist" maps in the map pocket of the car, so, being a little lazy, we set out with that. Although we checked our directions twice again on the Tourist map, I am sad to say our laziness, augmented with the insane street layout of Auckland, got us quite lost again. We were doing pretty well up to a point, but then we just ended up driving right off the map we had. After milling around in the south end of Auckland for a while, we finally found Dominion road, and ended up driving right past the Dive Shop it took us hours to find yesterday.

We did eventually find Karangahape road, and after parking, we wandered the street for some time. We found a street side cafe and had a cocktail while watching the locals and tourists wander by, but for once didn't take a picture of us doing it. Although the shops and restaurants were a little offbeat (think Huntsville downtown - lots of artsy crafty shops but with a pan-asian flavour) the really interesting thing to me was that the sidewalk was covered by an overhang almost the full length of the street. I'm not talking about some organized city wide thing. Each individual streetfront building had its own overhang cantilevered out from the building front. This may be a nationwide thing, as we noticed a similar fashion in some of the smaller towns we drove through on our way to Pukehina Beach on Friday.

By now the day was clouding over and we were in need of lunch, so we drove (mostly directly) back to the apartment, stopping only briefly to reserve our hotel room for the Friday night before we fly home. We selected the hotel attached to the Sky Tower, a CN Tower-esque structure in downtown Auckland. Here is a shot from below I took while waiting for Debbie to book us in.


After returning the car to the apartment parking garage, we dressed for cooler weather and set out for a late lunch. We took a look at the lovely Ferry Building which I didn't get a picture of, on the way walking one last time past the QE2.


I realize she's not the biggest cruise ship out there, but what makes the QE2 seem so large I think is the no nonsense, slab sided-ness of her profile. It's not all promenades and first class balconies and swimming pool decks. It's portholes, windows and lifeboats. It gives a very solid impression, like it would take a deliberate act of god to send her to the deep. It's like they were still expecting to have to convert her to troop ship or hospital ship duty if war broke out. Can you imagine a Princess lines cruise ship in either of those capacities?

We walked past the statue erected using the KZ1 America's Cup Challenger sailboat. At 38 Tonnes, 116 ft long, and a mast height of over 150 ft, it makes an impressive fixture (I'm not crazy ... I took a picture of the informational sign below it). Notice Debbie standing at the bottom next to the informational sign to get an idea of scale.


We settled in at a harbourfront bar/restaurant called the Loaded Hog, and had some late lunch and watched the comings and goings in what they call the viaduct harbour. This harbour is a deepwater inlet created for the America's Cup challenges held in NZ. Now it is used almost exclusively by tourist cruise boats. They have turned some of the previous America's Cup challenger sailboats into tourist excursions, and we watched a couple of them return to harbour. The one pictured below was piloted by a very skilled man. He brought that 70ish foot long, fully loaded sailboat into the narrow slip like he was parking a Mini. The people aboard applauded, and rightly so.


And here, as I am sure you were missing it, are a couple of shots of us at the restaurant.



I promised some musings on life in NZ. The first thing you notice when you land is how expensive everything seems. Even with the favourable exchange rate, most restaurant, food, hotel, etc. prices seem a bit high. One thing that offsets this is that they build the GST into the price of everything and then round up. The first day, we never saw a coin other than the 1 and 2 dollar coins. Since then we've seen the other denominations (no pennies yet) but it is uncommon to see a price not rounded to nearest quarter, and more often to the nearest 50 cents. The 50 cent piece is in common circulation and it's pretty big, larger than our two dollar coin, so you don't look forward to getting one.

Another offset to restaurant prices, at least, is the general lack of tipping. It is not common practice to tip here, except for exceptional service. The waitpersons are paid a living wage, apparently, so do not have to live off tips as in Canada. Given these moderators, we have found that prices in Auckland still seemed a little high, but not too bad. Jumping forward, we have found that outside the big city, prices are a little more reasonable, probably on par with Toronto all things considered.

We went to the grocery store in Auckland on Tuesday and looked for some snack foods to keep in the apartment. When we hit the cheese section of the store, it was amazing. We came upon one of those refrigerated islands which had a large variety of cheeses both locally made and imported. Most amazing for me was the unbelievable variety of blue cheeses available. If you like the stuff as I do, you would be amazed. I kid you not there must have been 20 different varieties of blue-ish cheeses. After being suitably impressed, we turned the corner to discover an even larger refrigerated display with another few dozen types of cheese. Turning the next corner revealed the half row of the "standard" cheeses next to the rest of the dairy goods. As a cheese aficionado, I've been in a lot of cheese shops (You do have cheese, don't you? - MP) and I've never seen anything that comes even close.

As advertised, the people here are very friendly and helpful. Aside from the idiot next to us on the way over (I saw his passport as he filled out his customs form and he was from the UK) we haven't run into a single rude person. Some wait staff are more or less helpful, but never rude or unpleasant.

Well, that's it for Thursday. On to Friday!

Don

Auckland

I haven't mentioned before that most of the pictures shown on the blog can be seen in larger format if you click on the picture.

We've enjoyed our first day here in Auckland, City of Sails. After a long sleep, we ventured out to do our first genuine tourist activity. We went to Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Encounter/Underwater World which was pretty interesting. The site features numerous wildlife attractions, such as Stingrays


Sharks that swim outside an acrylic underwater tunnel


Penguins in an artificially "natural" habitat



and lots of other small fish and less small crustaceans. There was also a re-creation of the cabin built by the Scott Antarctic expedition (1901-04) which was very detailed and well done. The entire attraction is built into the side of the hill on the edge of the water with decks and a pier built around the harbourside. It was a very windy day today.


Following our visit to the aquarium, we set out to face our first serious drive-around in our rental car. NZ is one of those drive-on-the-left countries, so it's fun and nerve wracking to navigate around this city.

There are two additional challenges. The first is that the drivers here are as agressive and fearless as you will find (except, perhaps in Montreal). No space between cars is too small to stuff yourself into. Unless you are within a few inches of the bumper of the car in front, you're driving too cautiously. It's nuts.

The second challenge is that the city planners appear to have been on hallucinogenic drugs when they laid out the city. Auckland is built on the waterfront, with several large-ish hills incorporated into the cityscape. There isn't a single major road or street that goes in a straight line, and most of them dead end somewhere. Just about every major route also undergoes at least one, sometimes three name changes along its length. For complete newcomers trying to navigate from one end of the city to the other across city streets, it was quite an adventure.

We did some needed shopping and after a stop for a refreshment on supposedly famous Ponsonby Road (we found nothing in particular to recommend it)we headed back to our apartment.

Once back we dropped off the rental car and headed out for some dinner. On the way we noticed the large ship that had docked on the other side of the wharf from us (somehow we completely missed it when we drove in - that tells you how absorbed we were in that particular task). For the record, the Queen Elizabeth 2 is really really big.





We went for dinner and then walked out to the end of Prince's Wharf to get a closer look at the many sailboats out in the harbour. It seems Wednesday night is race night in Auckland, as there were at least two races underway. Click on this picture to get a better view of how busy it was.



I'll leave the details about life in Auckland (Cheese? Have we got Cheese!) for another day, and I will finish with a few more pictures of the harbour and boats.

This is an America's cup boat - check out the guy at the top of the mast.



Some guy blocking the view of the harbour from our balcony



A shot looking toward shore from our apartment



That's it for today. Until the next update ...

Don

The Trip West

Our vacation started relatively uneventfully. We arrived at Pearson 2 1/2 hours before our flight, and by the time we were waiting for the flight, well under an hour had passed. We settled in and waited paitently for our boarding call.



The flight to Los Angeles was smooth and relatively painless. We arrived, spent an hour getting our boarding passes for the Auckland leg of the trip, and then waited paitently for our boarding call.



After a long and arduous flight over the Pacific (more later), we arrived in Auckland safely at 5:30 am. We weren't allowed to check in to the apartment we had rented until 11:00 am so we waited patiently around at the Auckland airport for a few hours.



We decided to finish our waiting closer to the apartment, so we took a shuttle van to the Auckland Harbourfront and settled in to wait patiently until 11:00.



All of our "waiting" aside, we are now safely ensconced in our lovely apartment overlooking the Auckland harbour. The flight from L.A. to Auckland was a trial for sure. Our seats were located near the back of the 747, with one seat on the aisle and the other right next. We were in a group of 4 seats, so the inside seat had a neighbour and it was our poor fortune to end up with a not very good neighbour. He settled in, took over the arm rest (and then some), and was sleeping shortly after takeoff. That was the end of the armrest for the rest of the journey. I'm not sure why I didn't say something later on after he woke, but for whatever reason, we suffered in silence.

To add to the woes for the unfortunate occupants of these seats, there was a heating vent right underneath the inside seat, and it pumped out the heat for the entire duration. Needless to say, the air around the inside seat became unbearably hot. We blocked it off as well as we could with blankets and traded seats back and forth to share the pain. Our combined sleep total for the journey has got to be less than 4 hours.

On the plus side, this 747 was equipped with a state-of-the-art entertainment system. Each seat had a small LCD TV screen built into the back of the seat in front. There was a corded remote control built into the armrest. Each seat could select independently from dozens of movies and television shows. It's pretty impressive and it was a godsend given our inability to find peaceful sleep.

And so, it's been many many hours since this correspondent has slept, so I think I'll sign off for today. I'll pass on some pics and thoughts about Auckland tomorrow.

Until then ...

Don