Hello, Newmans (Jan. 15)

After leaving Auckland, we headed up north to our next accommodation at the home of a couple from Torbay, a suburb of Auckland on the North Shore. Before arriving there, we took in Long Bay, a fantastic little beach right by Torbay that is a favorite of Aucklanders due to its gentle waves, nice beach, and close proximity to the city.

Andrew endures the tough life of a travel correspondent

Torbay is a beautiful town perched on a set of hills overlooking Hauraki Gulf about 30-40 minutes outside of Auckland. Views of the sea and distant islands abound, and many of the homes are built on quite steep, scenic hillsides. From certain vantages in Torbay you can still see Sky Tower in Auckland. Compared to the ‘burbs we’re familiar with in the US, Torbay ain’t bad at all.

Something you don't see everyday on the beach

We met the couple, Rachael and Shanon Newman, through CouchSurfing, a site that connects people willing to host travelers in their homes with people interested in staying with local people (free of charge) while they are traveling. It sounds almost cliché, but based on our few experiences so far, the site really does seem to create a like-minded community of people that are interested in meeting and helping other travelers. Because it’s such a cool idea and we are looking to minimize expenses when possible, we’ll be trying to CouchSurf through New Zealand whenever possible.

Our excellent hosts, the Newmans

Becky had heard about CouchSurfing sometime in early 2006 while we were still in Burlington, and thought it would be a good thing to participate in, given that we would be coming here to NZ this year. We ourselves had a group of 5 early-20 somethings stay in our spare bedroom last August while they were on a fundraising trip to Burlington, and while we probably wouldn’t recommend anyone have that large a group stay in their apartment, it was an interesting experience.

Friends and fam, try not to worry too much about us staying on random people’s couches. There are verification processes and feedback mechanisms (like eBay), and from what we have seen CouchSurfing seems to be a pretty good self-selecting group of people interested in helping other people out. As always though, we are trying to be careful.

We have to say that Rachael and Shanon are terrific ambassadors for both New Zealand and CouchSurfing. They made our first CouchSurfing experience great with their friendliness and warmth of hospitality. Rachael works in the tourism industry while Shanon is in building supply sales, and like most New Zealanders we’ve met, they didn’t seem to be huge fans of Auckland. According to Rachel, we’re about the 25^th group of CouchSurfers they’ve had in their home, and they’ve gone to visit some of the CouchSurfers that visited them from San Diego. Hopefully we’ll be able to put up someone we stay with someday as well.

The Auckland skyline as seen from Torbay

Despite them having to work in the morning, Rachel and Shanon shared a dinner of fish and chips with us and stayed up late and chatted about New Zealand and traveling abroad. They’ve had some amazing travels, with trips to Europe, North America, and throughout Asia under their belt, which made us a bit jealous. Though by the end of the year, we may have seen more of New Zealand than they have, so we’ll have that going for us.

Some bad news to report from the Newmans’ household, however. On our second full day of owning Ron Burgundy, while parked on the street outside their house he was backed into by one of their neighbors who didn’t expect to see such a handsome display of automobile machismo parked directly across from their driveway. Once we determined that Ron had only suffered a little paint damage and a small dent, we assured the offending woman that it was not necessary to involve insurances and body shops (oddly called ‘Panelbeaters’ here in NZ – more evocative than ‘auto body repair technician’, eh?).

There are several reasons we didn’t get Ron fixed: 1) Ron has suffered numerous prior indignities, and truth be told, it might be tough to tell the panelbeaters where to stop in fixing the damage from this particular scrape. 2) Ron’s manly persona demands we not take him in for such a trifling scratch. 3) It would probably take several days to repair a minor dent and we were eager to get on the road the next day. 4) We have convinced ourselves that by not making this woman involve her insurance company over Ron we have gained a measure of car karma, or perhaps carma [Ed. – Groan. Stick with car karma.], for the next year and so Ron won’t break down and leave us sitting some day on a mountain on the South Island.

So for the above reasons we told her to forget it, but to swear on her children’s heads to be more careful in the future. Well OK we didn’t do that, but perhaps we’ll remember to next time.

After two days staying with the Newmans, we planned to go to the Northland area of the country. Rachel was a bit sad that we were leaving after “only two days”, which she said was the shortest duration any of her previous CouchSurfers had stayed. We had picked a stay of two days because we thought it would give us a good amount of time to visit without imposing too much on their hospitality. Imagine our surprise when they were almost disappointed that we were leaving after only a few days, and that they wouldn’t have minded putting us up for up to a week! Maybe we’ll have to stop by again in our travels here. In any event, file the Newmans under the heading: Ridiculously Good Hosts.

Next up: a trip to the Waitakere (why-TOCK-er-ay) Ranges

[Note: We’ve recently had a request to add more pictures to the blog. We’ll try and do our best to accommodate and add more pics here and on Flickr when possible. However, uploading pics is probably the most difficult thing for us to do on the internet these days, since we usually need to use my computer to do it, and getting a connection on my laptop has been fairly hard to do. We’ll try our best, though.]