day 6 - Rangitoto Island

Today we had an adventure to Rangitoto Island. It is about a 25 minute ferry ride from Auckland Harbour. It was a pretty overcast day, but it turned out to be a perfect day for a nice hike and walk around the island.

Rangitoto Island is said to have formed in a single week. The first half is reported to have taken 8 hours and the second half was finished before the week was over. It is a "dormant" volcano, and is part of the same volcano field that Auckland City is built on. Rangitoto is the youngest volcano as it erupted a short 600 years ago and is about 259 meters high.

We left on the ferry around 9:15am and it took about an hour and 20 minutes to get to the top of the volcano. It was a beautiful walk with lots of lava fields along the way.

We also crawled around in some lava caves, which was nice! We didn't bring our torch, but luckily we met a nice english couple along the way who lent us theirs to head into one of the caves for a wee bit. It is not a real torch, no worries, just a flashlight to us American folk.

Then we headed on to explore more of the island, such as the Kidney Fern Grove, Kowhai Grove and the Bachs along the coast. The Bachs are cottages that have been on the island for a hundred years or so and are kept up by the Rangitoto Island Conservation Group.

It was nice to get out of the city and walk around.

We have arrived back at the hostel to do some laundry and get ready to head north of Auckland for a few days!

day 3, 4, 5

So we finished off the day on Monday with a nice little sushi dinner at a quiet little Japanese restaraunt up Queen St. It was fabulous! The wasabi was nice and hot, the fish was very fresh and the sake was sweet.


On day 4 we decided to do a free (we love free!) city tour from the adventure tour bus company Stray. The tour is designed to get you off Queen street to see some of the other sites in Auckland. The tour started with a visit to the Sky Tower and a free Sky Jump to the winner of the game. Well, I won the game (heads vs. tails). I took heads all the way to the championship! As you can read in my post below, it is a 192 meter fall from the tower. It was sweet and the jump suit was even sweeter!



















From the Sky Tower we headed down to the harbor to look at the oil refinery...no actually to get a good view of the harbor bridge. Can you see the bridge?















We took a few photos then headed down the bay to the Michael Joseph Savage Memorial Park to get a great view of Rangitoto Island and learn a little about Maori culture.




















Rangitoto Island is the youngest volcano in Auckland at only 600 years old. Our guide was Maori (the native New Zealanders) so he told us a lot about the culture and the legend of how the islands came about. The legend is that a young boy Maui fished the north island out of the sea. The north island is the fish, the south island is the canoe and Stewart island is the anchor. From there we headed to Mount Eden the highest volanco in Auckland and got a great view of both the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea, and downtown Auckland. After Mount Eden we went and had a bite to eat and then went to the Harbour Bridge. We got to walk out onto the underside of the bridge and watch one of our fellow travelers bungy jump. I decided not to jump this time. I am waiting for the good bungy jumps down by Queenstown, or just felt cheap at the time and didn't want to spend the money. There was a great view of downtown Auckland from the bridge!















After the free tour we went on a trip to the grocery store. Always a fun experience.

On Wednesday we decided to do the Coast to Coast walk http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/whatson/places/walkways/coasttocoast/index.asp. It is a 16 km walk from Pacific Ocean (downtown Auckland) to the Tasman Sea (Onehunga). It goes through and over many of the great sites and neighborhoods in Auckland. It starts downtown in Viaduct habour and heads through the University of Auckland



















through Auckland Domain and past the Auckland Museum, up Mount Eden down to Cornwall Park (through a crouquet club)













In Cornwall Park, John is standing next to Acacia Cottage, one of the earliest surviving timber buildings in New Zealand!














and up One Tree Hill (which lost the original tree back in 1852 and the second tree in 2000 due to saws) and finally down to the coast and the Tasman Sea. We were a little tired at the end, but it was a great walk.


We ended the day by grabbing a bottle of wine and some of the cheese and crackers we got at the grocery store the other night and headed to a free movie in the park at the base of Mt. Eden. It was fun to sit on the lawn have some wine and watch a great movie. It was a New Zealand movie named "No. 2". I definitley recommend watching it if you get the chance.


Day 5 was filled with completing tasks such as, e-mail, setting up a mobile phone, setting up a tour for the rest of the country, doing a little job searching, planning our next adventure and more computer usage. Not much to report about today (Thursday), except we did go to BurgerFuel for lunch and had some great NZ burgers and kumara (sweet potato) fries (I preferred the spud fries)!


Tomorrow will be another adventure.

sky jump

Just wanted to let eveyone know that I got to jump 192 meters of the sky tower on Tuesday. I was pretty cool. It is a controlled 90 km/hr fall from the observation deck. I will tell more in our next post, but wanted to let you know that I have already started to jump off of things. It should be a fun 6 months! Sweet as...

P.S. You know that song "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz. It is the song that we danced for our first dance at our wedding. Well, it is super popular here right now. Andrea loves it...and so do I (really!).

days 1-3

We are just 2 of the 1 million people here in Auckland. There are only about 4 million people in the entire country, so Auckland is a busy place. It is Monday here and there is a lot of hustle and bustle around the town as work and university start back up again today.

Saturday, after we arrived, we took a bit of a rest before heading out for a walk down to the harbor. It was a beautiful evening and we had some dinner by the water. John had a beer for his friends at Wenck and a one for his friends at Target, cheers mates!

After dinner we headed to the Auckland Domain for a free symphony concert. It was a nice evening and the concert was fantastic, at least the first half. Yes, we only made it for 1/2 of a symphony concert as we were too tired to last the entire thing. The locals say there are usually about 150,000 people there, but it seemed like even more than that.

Sunday we slept in some before starting the day. We headed out to grab a bite to eat. John had some NZ native green mussels, they were yummy.

Later in the evening we headed to the Sky Tower, which is the highest building in the southern hemisphere. It is 328 meters high and provided beautiful views of the city and harbor. This is a view down through 38 mm glass in the floor of the view deck which was 220 meters above the street.

There was a cafe there where we had a drink to enjoy the sunset before heading out to dinner. So it was a nice enjoyable day.

Today it was down to business! We had our orientation at the IEP office (International Exchange Program) and got a lot of information about what to do in New Zealand and how to navigate the country, so we are excited to get "off the beaten path" a bit more. Then we opened a bank account and got our IRD/Tax number so that we can work while we are here. There are a lot of job openings coming up soon to pick Kiwi Fruit, so we may look at doing that. Down here you have to say kiwifruit, you cannot just say kiwi because the kiwi's/locals may think you are eating their national birds.

We will be in Auckland for a few more days before heading off somewhere, we are still not quite sure where we will go next.

Auckland is the largest Polynesian city in the world, interesting fact for you!

John has taken a few showers now, no worries.

Tipping is not common here in New Zealand, so the first few waiters/waitresses we had must have been pleased with the added cash they made from us.

day one post

So, I was in the middle of a nice blog about our first day in NZ and the fire alarm in the building went off. We had to escape down the stairs and I didn't get to post my blog. We are not sure what happened, but the building is still there and is okay.

In the arrival picture below it is hard to tell, but I was a little dirty. I think you could have squeezed a pint of grease out of my hair. Anyway, I will post this now and do a more thorough post later this afternoon. We are off to orientation now.

we've arrived

We have made it to New Zealand! The trip, as to be expected, had a few periods of excitement along the way. We got through security at MSP airport and were very anxious to get our trip underway. The anticipation quickly turned into a bit of frustration after our plane was delayed 2 hours and we were unsure if we would make our Air New Zealand flight. Well, we did make it and even had 10 minutes to spare! Then we were off on our 13 hour flight and after a couple of movies and some sleep we arrived in Auckland, New Zealand around 7:30am on February 21st.

So here we are, quite tired, groggy and we certainly could use a shower. But we are very excited to be here and look forward to many adventures. There is a Symphony playing tonight just down the street in a park for free, so we will likely attend that this evening and just relax and enjoy!

It is about 68 degrees and a bit overcast here. Hope you all are doing well.

Just before departure in Minneapolis, MN.

In Auckland, just after our arrival.

one more day

We will be on a jet plane tomorrow at this time. Our flight to LA leaves at 5:00 pm, then a few hours in LAX before our 13 hour flight to Auckland. I hope I can get some sleep on the flight. Andrea is great at sleeping on planes, but I am not so good. I like to sleep on a nice comfortable bed. Andrea thinks I'm a little bit of a princess, but I just think I have high standards. I guess I better get used to sleeping in odd places. I know we have a bed in a hostel the first two nights, but after that we may be sleeping in a van down by the river or some other "unique" location. It should be an awesome adventure. We are getting super excited and a little nervous. Off to take care of a few last minute details. Thank you to everyone for all of your support so we could make this little trip a reality.

Do you like Alice?

departure in one week

Time seems to be escaping us faster than we could have anticipated.

We are officially one week away from leaving for New Zealand on a jet plane and we couldn't be more excited. At times it is hard to say whether the excitment is coming from the destination or the fact that we will be done packing and moving! We are leaning more towards the destination...

Picture

I thought I would add a picture. This is from our wedding on August 31, 2008