We made it to Auckland in one piece, surprisingly so did our bags. It was a long two days of travel but we are here now and after 3 sleeps the jet lag has pretty much sorted itself out. It is certainly colder here than it is at home right now, but things are starting to warm up a bit. We've been spending the last few days enjoying everything that Auckland has to offer, taking in the usual sites and walking around the downtown quite a bit. We went to the revolving restaurant on the top of the Skycity Tower, Auckland's version of the CN Tower. We also went to Kelly Tarlton's which is a underwater world with heaps of penguins, stingrays, and sharks. Today we went to an outlet mall as we realized we will need some slightly warmer clothes, bikinis and board shorts just aren't going to cut it. It's just the beginning of spring in New Zealand right now and the weather from the south to the north can be very different so it's a good idea to have a jacket of some kind. Tommorow we are going to go on a guided city tour which will take us to a few more places we haven't seen yet. Today we finalized plans for the rest of our stay here. We've booked a 'Magic' bus tour which will take us literally everywhere in New Zealand from the very north tip all the way to the south tip and everything in between. In Canada we did the very west to the very east and I guess this will be much of the same. It looks like it's going to be an amazing month and we will meet a ton of great people on the bus, who are all out to do the same thing as us. We are going to stay at backpackers hostels the whole way along, as we have been since we got here. The atmosphere is great and there are a lot of cool people hanging around. We'll update from the road in a little while once we've seen some more stuff, we will spend the next 3 or 4 days exploring north of Auckland, taking in the bay of islands and doing some sandboarding in Cape Reigna.
View from the SkyCity restaurant - Orbit
Penguins at Kelly Tarlton's
View of the orange Ferry Building and downtown from the waterfront
Our 747 Jet that we spent a lot of time on