Hello Auckland My Old Friend (Nov. 7 – 16)

So after ten months of traveling, exploring all of New Zealand’s nooks and crannies, we’ve finally made it back to Auckland, the Big Smoke, as it were. The first thing that hit us as we approached the sprawling metropolis from the south was that there was an actual highway. Miles and miles of 4-lane (and sometimes more!) motorway, divided by a median – okay, maybe I’ll skip my usual harangue. Not that the highway is all beer and skittles, as Auckland pretty much has the country’s only traffic, and how… As we slowly drifted into the city in mid-afternoon congestion on a typically cloudy Auckland day, we began to have some brief moments of sadness at leaving the bucolic and traffic-free hinterlands.

But we had important house-sitting duties to do, so slogged on we did. As we’ve mentioned previously, we’re house-and-cat-sitting for our CSing friends, the Newmans, in their new crib in Auckland’s North Shore for a few weeks in mid-November. Fortunately the North Shore isn’t like living in the city, and the city’s ghastly traffic can be largely avoided, unless we need to go south on the motorway for any reason. We try not to find reasons.

This is about as close to Auckland as we like to get! At the summit of Rangitoto...

With our first week here in the bag, I’d say it’s gone about as well as we’d have hoped, as we’ve gotten out a few times, but mostly we’ve done nothing but lounge around. The lounging and temporary lack of responsibility for trip planning has been quite good, but I think more than a few weeks not doing much would drive us nuts. To be honest, it’s been kind of great to have our own space for awhile while we’re here, and much like when we house-sat for Kieran and Belinda in Canterbury, we’ve found traveling to be great, but you can forget how nice having your own space and sleeping in the same place for a few weeks can be.

Another gorgeous day on the North Shore. Some might say, picture perfect...

Although maybe I’m short-selling us a little bit, because we did get out of the house a bunch. We went up to Shakespear Regional Park, which lies out on the very end of Whangaparaoa Peninsula on the North Shore. Somewhat oddly, it shares a border with a military facility which warned of firing range activity on the day we were there. It seemed like a good idea to give that part a wide berth. The park was nice, with heaps of just-flowering pohutakawa trees (often called NZ Christmas trees) but what really impressed us is that they had such a big park taking up some ridiculously valuable oceanfront real estate. Good on ya, North Shore.

A pohutakawa tree in bloom

We also took a ferry out to Rangitoto Island, a dormant volcano island that lays in Hauraki Gulf, not more than a few miles from Auckland’s waterfront. We nearly missed our ferry since we underestimated how much time it takes to get into town around 9 on a weekday morning, who knew there would be rush hour traffic. It was a pretty good hike to the top, though the crater was disappointingly covered by trees. Auckland is built on something like 6 or 7 old volcanoes, and we hear the museum has a pretty frightening multimedia display on what it will be like if there’s a geologic rupture leading to major volcanic activity in the area, which the city is apparently overdue for. Auckland will not be the place to be when that happens.

The outline of Rangitoto in the distance

Lastly, yesterday we got to Piha Beach, one of Auckland’s picturesque black-sand west coast beaches. It’s a haul out there, but it’s well worth it to see the site of one of our favorite NZ TV shows, Piha Rescue, which is like Baywatch, except that it’s real, and there’s no Pam Anderson, nor almost as sadly, The Hoff. West coast beaches, and Piha in particular, are notorious for their dangerous rips, which suck out heaps of tourists, who have to be rescued by the life saving club, thus providing the show with heaps of material. Based on our unscientific survey of Kiwis, most of them say they wouldn’t swim there since Piha is well known here. Most episodes of Rescue bear that out, with Aussies and surprised swimmers of various Asian nationalities having to be saved. We skipped the surf on our visit, as we’ve enjoyed the nice beaches on the east coast, but caught quite a show from the lifeguards in training.

The wild coastline at Piha

Well it’s been a tough week, and we’ve got a couple more to go here. We’re in the process of selling Ron Burgundy, maybe trying to sell some beer if we can gin up some motivation to go into the city, are working out our Tahiti and San Francisco plans, and want to go up to the Northland one last time. Add in my 28^th birthday tomorrow, and I know I know, it’s sounds like a ridiculously busy schedule for the next two weeks, but someone’s got to do it.