Auckland... City of Sails

We've been in Auckland for about two weeks now and thankfully didn't suffer too much with jetlag after our 14 hour flight from Chile. Auckland is the biggest city in New Zealand (about the same size as Dublin) and is right on the waterfront, it's actually built on nearly 50 extinct volcano's with lots of parks, beaches and greenery so quite a pretty place. The city centre has lots of really tall buildings. In fact it's got the tallest building in the southern hemisphere and for only $130 you can throw yourself off the top with a little wire to stop you reaching the bottom head first - I've decided to pass on this for the moment....

We've decided to stay here for about 4 months after speaking to Lincoln and Emma who we met while rafting in Peru. They live here and have convinced us that it's the best place to start our New Zealand adventures. Auckland is about 5 hours drive from the very top of the North Island and about 7 hours drive to the very bottom so it's probably a good place to base ourselves.

Last weekend we bought ourselves a 1.5 litre Mazda Familia, it's got pop up headlights which I think are really cool but Ciaran thinks they're a bit naff. Sure, he's a bloke so he doesn't know much about cars anyway, every girl knows that pop up lights rock! Anyway, having a car means that we're free to explore whenever we want. No more 5am starts for us!


After arriving here we stayed in a really fun hostel for the first couple of days while we got mundane things like bank accounts and tax numbers etc sorted out. Our hostel was next door to a brothel which Ciaran found hilarious (especially the BJ bar), can't say I was that amused!! After a couple of days we decided that we would have to take the big step and rejoin the settled world so we've moved into a house with two kiwi's called Ben and Candice, oh, and a cat called Toscar (!) who we prefer to call Tosser, he's only managed to scrape Ciaran once which isn't bad considering Ciaran's track record with cats. Ben and Candice are both really friendly, Ben's quite quiet but always nice and we've gone to the local pub quiz (which is in a pub across from the National Prostitutes Union offices!!) with him a couple of times. Candice is really arty/hippie and good fun too. We've attached a picture of the four of us on the night of Candice's birthday - they're the ones in the stupid hats!



The house that we're living in is a wooden villa up on stilts with a big deck out the sunny back garden. Great for relaxing after a stressful day of sightseeing.... sigh...

Here's a photo of the house and the car...

Apart from that we've just been enjoying Auckland. Have had a few nights out (of course) and have been doing lots of sighseeing and trips to the beach. Next big step is job hunting which we're not looking forward to....