North Shore Beaches

As you know we are living with Bilge Rat's cousin. He is living in North Shore City, once an independent city next to Auckland, now a governmental district within Auckland. You reach North Shore City as soon as you cross the long harbour bridge over the sea. It's really close to Auckland and a 30 minute bus ride, usually takes you to the centre. But it is less crowded and you see more nature and parks, so it is a pretty nice place to live.

But it has another advantage over central Auckland: Beaches. Along the North Shore you can find a couple of really nice beaches. In good New Zealand style they are neither crowded nor polluted and quite a thing to see. Bilge Rat's cousin's friendly aunt took a day of to introduce us to the beaches. We started off following her favourite jogging trail, which goes simply along the beaches connecting one beach with the other. Here you can draw yourself a picture about just how many nice little beaches there are to explore:

We then took the car and visited some more beaches further north, including the furthest north: Long Bay, which is already in a nature reserve and not only especially long, but also especially beautiful.

After enjoying the beaches, we visited Devonport Hill, another highlight of North Shore City. Devonport is facing the Auckland sea in the very south of North Shore. From the top of the hill you get a really nice view on central Auckland. Also there are a lot of military installations left on the hill, which you can explore. In WW2 after Japan's expansionism reached as far south as Australia, New Zealand also feared a potential Japanese invasion and fortified it's harbours. Due to Perl Harbour the Japanese could never fully invade Australia and thus never reached New Zealand, but the military fortifications still exist. There are some harbour artillery, bunker and a net underground passages and rooms. And you can freely explore all of it! Pretty cool.

Auckland, as seen from Devonport

Incoming!

Finally we went to huge inland lake Pupuke, another highlight of North Shore City. This giant lake offers nice views, a variety of ducks in large numbers and nice meadows for picnics and relaxing.

On the shore you can also find a really scenic old pumphouse, which now serves as a restaurant.

That concludes our exploration of North Shore City! Thanks a lot to Bilge Rat's cousin's aunt for leading us around. It was a really pleasant change from the concrete of downtown Auckland. And we have to admit that at least this part of Auckland has some really nice sport for retreating!

Auckland 2

And thus our long journey there and back again ended where it had begun: in Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city. Bilge Rat's cousin warmly offered us shelter once more and we tried to use the few remaining days to sell our dear old Roachmobile to the next pair of backpackers.

Unfortunately we didn't pick the best time to do that. It rained basically every day with only the amount and degree of rain varying. That's always bad if you want to sell a car, cause people stay indoors having such weather. Secondly it's close to Christmas. And what do tourists and even backpackers do on Christmas? Well they don't take an overpriced flight to New Zealand, that's for sure. They'd rather stay home and celebrate with friends and family or even fly home trying to sell their car before leaving. So yeah, we kinda picked the worst time of the year to sell a second hand car.

We rented a space at the Backpacker's Car Market and after day one even stayed with the car to talk potential buyers into buying glorious Roachmobile, however, none came. The one pair interested in our car was scared away by us, when we showed no skill or lack in haggling. When we learned the basics of haggling, they were gone and no others showed up. Except this crazy ass family will to give us 1/5 of what we wanted (And we wanted still less that what we paid for, not even considering all the repairs, registration and Warranty of Fitness...

good old Roachmobile

Leaving the car issue aside, browsing through the big city once more, we found some more curious spots worth visiting:

We happened to park our car next to a talented metal artist, building from scrap metal popular figures from pop culture. Can you recognize all of them?

There is a Daiso in Auckland! Everybody that has been to Japan or close to it, probably knows Daiso, the famous 100 Yen store. It's like a 1$ store, but it has everything: from DIY supplies, office supplies, gardening, car, electricity, toys, dishes, food and fun articles (and much much more). There is nothing you cannot get from Daiso, and it's at its cheapest possible prize. It's so much fun to just browse the store and pick up some curious things.
Right. It's all made in China, of course. But then so are most of the clothes, shoes, etc. you can get at popular vendors. And the workers don't get higher wages, just because the same items cost more at regular vendors. So what's the difference?
On the other hand we are always buying fair-trade, when we are able to. Because that does make a difference. But that won't stop us from having fun at Daiso here and then!

Game Houses! Fucking Shit, of course! Auckland is full of Korean immigrants. And what to Koreans love? Games, Games, Games. Look at my Korea article, to see some proof. While older people prefer to play Baduk, younger generations tend to computer games. The most popular being StarCraft. That means the favourite past time of Koreans is playing computer games. But they don't play at home, like in Europe. They go to Game Houses. A Game House has a set up of modern PCs ready to play the most popular games, and usually also offers some food and drinks. So you sit together with your friends and start gaming. It's quite the social thing in Korea, because while gaming people will share stories, rant about their jobs and so on.
So with so many Koreans in Auckland there are bound to be Game Houses around too. And indeed there are. Of course everything inside (including the PCs and Windows versions) are in Korean, as are all the guests inside. But that didn't stop bilge rat and me to pass some afternoon inside trying out Left 4 Dead 2 in coop mode.

Finally there was a pretty cool photo gallery in the centre of town. Every picture had a short story beneath. The pictures tried to raise awareness about social and environmental problems. But they also showed just how amazingly beautiful our planet can be, when people don't destroy it with waste and inconsiderate behaviour. There is not much time left to stop destroying our planet and to stop bereaving people of their culture, if we want any of that to remain for future generations to marvel upon...

From Auckland to Gisborne

After staying in Auckland for one and a half weeks, we moved on in our newly bought car to Gisborne. With no driving experience with automatic gear, left side traffic or vans, I took on myself the job to drive us the 500 km through New Zealand's countryside.

New Zealand Traffic

What traffic might one expect in New Zealand? Well the answer is simple: none. At least outside of the big cities. The country measures 300 000 square kilometers, divide that by the number of people (4 million) and you get 13.3 people by square kilometer. However 1.4 million of these live in Auckland. So if you remove them from the equation, you are left with 8.6 people per square kilometer and even those people probably live in New Zealand's other central cities, like Wellington or Christchurch. Anyway long story short, there is no traffic outside of New Zealand's big cities. Despite that the maxmimum allowed speed is 100 km/h, even on motorways and highways. That seems slow at first, but with most roads being windy and climbing up and down mountains, you can't use the full allowed speed range that often. On the positive side, though New Zealand is really huge and has a small tax income correlated with the size, the streets are in excellent condition. We met not one street, which was below excellent.

Traffic Rules

New Zealanders drive on the "correct side of the road". Or so they say. I.e. the left side. It occured to me that all countries having left side traffic always talk about it being the "correct" or "right" side, while other countries see their "right" side as so given and normal, that they don't ever mention it.
Apart from that other differences include very special roundabout rules. The first is that there are some roundabouts with two tracks. You take the inner one, if you don't want to use the exit next to you and the outter one, if you do. Second is the way you need to use your indicator. While in Germany you simply enter the roundabout and blink, when the next exit is the one you intend on taking, in New Zealand you need to see first if the exit you are going to take is the first exit, correlated with the position you are entering the roundabout. If so, use the left indicator. If you want a latter exit, use the right indicator. In this case however you need to change the indicator the moment you passed the last exit before the one you intend on taking. Pretty confusing, eh?
Apart from the strange indicating practice, the rest actually makes sense after getting used to it. Oh, and there are a lot of roundabouts to gain this practice in New Zealand.


Landscape

The nice thing about driving through New Zealand is that you will be able to see a lot of its beautiful landscape. It's even worth planning your route accordingly. We took a route that would lead us along the beach for quite some time. Very unique about New Zealand's landscape is its diversity. You can encounter barren lands and after 10 minutes they change into fresh green meadows, only to give way to rocky mountains and beautiful beaches afterwards. When we were climbing up the hills, we even understood why some people use the adjective fantastic to describe New Zealand's nature. We went through a part of green mountain meadows hiding in gray fog, only revealing some stones and rocks here and there. That really created an eerie kind of atmosphere and we thought ourselves to be in a fantasy movie.
One thing all different forms of landscape have in common though are sheep and cows. You can encounter them everywhere, even at the most remote places with no house, farm or town to be seen anywhere. In fact New Zealand's sheep population by far exceeds its human population. New Zealand is host to some 36 million sheep. That's 9 sheep to one human.



Out of Gas in the Middle of Nowhere

Especially the last part of our trip led us through about 200 kilometers of uninhabited land. Although we bought maps beforehand, we could not guess this, since there actually were locations mentioned on the map. So we left the last town with a gas tank more than half way full, expecting it to last easily till Gisborne. Guess what, it didn't. As it seems, we made a couple of beginner mistakes:

First: Always carry some extra gasoline with you when going for long car drives in New Zealand, since the number of petrol stations is very limited.
Second: Use any petrol station you can find on the road, when being on a long trip, even when your tank is still half full. You don't know when the next one will come.
Third: A car, especially a van, takes much more fuel when going up steep mountains. So be careful about that, when you estimate how far your tank might hold.

So we did not use that last petrol station, had no reserve and highly underestimated the increased gasoline usage for steep mountains. So there we were halfway between Opotiki (last town before the long nowhere) and Gisborne, with an almost empty tank still climbing up and down steep mountains. Also the sunlight left us earlier than expected, as we were driving to the easternmost city in the world. So what to do. We were afraid to drive on, since the engine could stop at any point leaving us on the middle of a narrow steep mountain road. So we considered using one of the few isles next to the road, park there and hope for someone to take us to the next town tomorrow morning. But then just when we decided to do that, there came a mysterious sign of some kind of hotel up ahead. It didn't say how far ahead, but we decided to go for it. After several more kilometers, we found one single house with light burning in the middle of the mountains. Having a big space for parking, we assumed it might be the hotel and stopped. Getting out of our van and approaching the house, however, we were stopped by loud and aggressive barking of several dogs. It being still night, we didn't see where the dogs were and if we could reach the house door unharmed. Also it looked nothing like a hotel here. Approaching some kind of fence the howls of the dogs got so loud and aggressive, that we ran back to our car.
That can't be the hotel, we agreed and after some thought, decided to drive a little further. Several kilometers later, the tank almost giving up (the car started to rumble), we spotted light at the horizon. Could that be the hotel, we thought. But getting closer the light was too strong for a single house. No it wasn't only one single hotel, we found a little mountain town. Wow.
With the last drops we reached the mountain town. And what do you know, it had a petrol station. We are saved, or so we thought. But getting closer, we found it was already closed. Damn it.
Parking our car and walking to some people standing nearby in front of some hall, we asked them for help. And as it happened, they said that they are waiting for the Karate lesson to end. Guess what, the sensei (teacher) was the owner of the petrol station (or her husband). So we waited for the lesson to end, and asked the white clothed people, that walked out, if they were the Karate instructor. Finding him, we pleaded for help. Ten minutes his wife came along the road, reopening the petrol station for us, saving our day.

With the tank refilled we managed the remaining 70 kilometers to Gisborne. And as luck was fond of us now, bilge rat could still get her key from the night reception of the hospital and we could move in her room in the middle of the night and had a bed to sleep.

scallywag

Auckland

We arrived in Auckland the weekend 22/23 of August.

My flight took almost 2 days and I had two stop overs, one in Dubai, the other in Brisbane, Australia. Exhausted we arrived in Auckland, where bilge rat's cousin picked us up with his car. Luckily we would be able to stay in his house for the first two weeks.

So the first two weeks in New Zealand, we spent exploring Auckland.
While Auckland is New Zealand's biggest city, it is not its capital, which is Wellington.
1.4 million people live in Auckland, making it also the most populated spot in New Zealand.
There is no subway or metro system, but we found the bus system quite convenient and affordable for our needs. It took us into the city center and back any time between 7am and 11pm.

City Center: Queen Street and K-Road

The center of the city is probably Queen Street, where most stores and restaurants are located. It's a broad street through downtown Auckland, which we went up and down several times. Also interesting is Karangahape Road (often abreviated K-Road), where you can find less expensive and more interesting stores than Queen Streets standard repository of downtown stores.

We quickly grew tired of Queen's Street, so we checked our Lonely Planet guide, donated by a good friend, for other attractions in Auckland.

Auckland Museum

somehow with these flags and colors this museum reminds me of some particular German building

We started by climbing up the hills of Auckland Domain and found the Auckland Museum on top. The museum hosts a large range of objects mainly attributed to the history and culture of New Zealand and the surrounding island states.

At ground level we learned a lot about the culture of the so called "Islanders", people inhabiting the islands located around New Zealand. There a sections about most island culture groups in the east pacific. You can follow a timetable when the islands have been populated and which language group is spoken there.

The second level focuses on New Zealand's indigenous people, the Maori. You can learn a lot about their history and way of living. There are big exhibits, like a accessible Marae (Meeting Hall) and smaller ones like cultural items. There are also some interesting photos that early Europeans made of New Zealand.

The third level tells tales from World War 2. We had no time to look at this exhibition, but it looked interesting and well made.

From what we have seen and read, Auckland Museum is one of the best museums in New Zealand, both of what you can see, as in how it is presented and the information you can get. We surely recommend a visit, when you are in Auckland.

Sky Tower

 

We had some coupon booklet with free entrance for the sky tower sky deck in Auckland. Since we passed it several times walking up and down Queen Street, we decided to give it a try. You can find these kind of towers in many cities and there's nothing special or interesting about this one. Inside there was a little movie theater explaining the history or Auckland and the tower. The first part was quite interesting. At the ticket counter we found that to reach said sky deck, we would need to buy elevator tickets for 40$ before we could reach the deck. Well... so much for the sky tower. So we haven't been up, but we don't think it's worth the money. Have a look of it from the outside and if you want, watch the free movie inside.

That's about all we did in Auckland. Not too much, but then we also enjoyed the hospitality of bilge rat's cousin and had other tasks in mind, like getting a car...