So, I’ve largely recovered from the flight, and I have an OU textbook to avoid. What better time to start the holiday memories…?
We flew out from Birmingham International on Saturday night. We landed in Dubai Sunday morning, and took off two hours later for Brisbane. An hour layover and we’re on again, this time to Auckland. It’s nearly 30 hours later, we’ve had about 4 hours sleep and it’s now lunchtime Monday. The brain is no longer working.
Auckland Airport is a marvellous thing. Sure, Dubai terminal 3 is a magnificent structural phenomenon, with walls of glass and two Oases, but Auckland is full of Kiwis. Somehow it’s completely alien and completely at home. I mean, we step off the plane straight into an immigration queue – but it’s efficient. It’s like the twilight zone.
The various officials are happy too. Back in Australia the security staff all looked like they’d had exceptionally bad news and were waiting to take it out on someone (and later on in Birmingham we’d walk into a world full of automatons) but here the immigration guys joked with us about what we were doing. The biosecurity lass was even cooler – we ticked just about all the red boxes we could find on the biosecurity form (food, plant matter, hiking boots, animal contact, living on a farm, smuggling wood) and she cheerfully worked down the list before telling us that we could go on our way.
Free, and into fresh clean New Zealand air. Surprisingly warm air. The Ford Mondeo we hired had air conditioning, so we did the British thing and wound the windows down instead…
20 minutes from the airport was our bed for the first three nights – the Grange Lodge Motel. Now, being British, we’d never been to a motel before and we had no idea what to expect – motels are where Americans live when they get thrown out of their apartments or need somewhere to go brew crystal meth in the coffee pot.
If you find yourself in need of a decent night’s kip in Auckland, give Pat & Bernie a try. A truly friendly welcome, a bloody comfy bed, and a studio style living/dining/cooking area. Most hotels I stay in are either horribly expensive (and not very good) or the predictable boxes of the big chains (and therefore expensive, not very good, and smaller than my room at Uni). This I’d have killed for at Uni. It was probably bigger than our first house…
The next day, we pry ourselves out of bed and go talk to Bernie. The night has been good to us, but apparently we were more travel weary than we felt – we now apparently look 15 years younger. Bernie clarifies a couple of points on NZ’s weird traffic rules and we head off shopping. Since shopping is ultimately boring, we’ll skip on to St Hellier’s beach…
Look at that beach.
Now go back and look at it again.
That’s a sandy beach, on a Tuesday lunchtime, in a high 20s heat. It’s 10 minutes away from the centre of Auckland. So I ask you, “where are all the people?”
It’s actually a question we kept asking ourselves while we were away – why is this beautiful resource, which is readily available to everyone, not jammed solid with students, the unemployed, and the elderly? Can you imagine any beach in the UK being that empty? Now realise that the water is crystal clear instead of the brown sludge that you get on an English beach…
The reason, we realised, is that there are only 4 million Kiwis, so you could spread them evenly across every beautiful location, and there’d still be no-one on that beach. When you put a quarter of the population (of both islands) in Auckland, it leaves no-one else to visit the beauty in the other parts of the country. Except for gawking tourists…
We did what every well adjusted tourist does next – we went shopping.
Auckland CBD (the Central Business District – or city centre) is the busiest in the country and Queen Street is the busiest shopping street in the city. Now, I’ll admit that we were there on a Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve genuinely seen Cambridge busier on a Sunday. It’s partly an illusion because the pavements are nearly as wide as the carriageways and the shops supply welcoming shadows to shelter you from the sun, but you could still have dropped a dozen Oxford Street’s in there and had space to spare.
This is the old Ferry building in the docks. Pretty, isn’t it. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I was hot and tired and just thought it looked nice.
It was time to move on, so we decided to go play in the rush hour traffic – a strange exercise that we would attempt will alarming regularity. What we actually ended up doing was staging the first part of a 13 day torture exercise on our annoying Aussie sat-nav, Karen. Karen, you see, had been told to avoid motorways and u-turns at all costs, so driving the wrong way up a motorway was a surprisingly effective way to drive her insane. That Tuesday’s attempt took us over the harbour bridge to Devonport – the side of the bay that was, until the bridge, only accessible by ferryboat or 2 hour drive.
It’s an area full of nice houses, almost certainly full of well paid execs from the CBD. Cool breezes, big houses, lots of green and a view of the harbour. I wanted to stay there forever.
Sadly, my camera decided that focussing was not something it wanted to do (something connected to the polariser I was using) so the best photo I have is this stunning paparazzi snap of Jean…
We spent an hour or more sat there, staring at the Auckland skyline, watching the ferry bring weary workers home, and wondering how the commuter on a jet-ski would get it off the beach.
Part 2 : Army Bay; driving Karen mad; the Peha Lion; and Fairy Footsteps Falls.
