Auckward Behaviour
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
49
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Auckland,
North Island,
New Zealand
Monday, February 4, 2008
Contact with horses: yes, we were riding in Torres del Paine;
Camping: yes, on Easter Island;
Tramping (walking, hiking) in rural areas: yes, in various places;
Any plant products etc: in our bags you will find a pot of pepper, tea bags, liquorice root....
This could be fun. Oh, and we seemed to have lost Thursday somewhere, which was careless, as we'd only used a few hours of it.
We landed and got ourselves allowed into the country, then set about getting our stuff in too. The first customs official we encountered was a bit concerned about all of our yes ticked boxes and we got sent down the aisle with the red floor. The one with nobody else in it. It's a fairly long time since either of us have felt like children who have been sent to the headmaster's office for being bad.
We got to the desk and explained our yeses to the man there. He was far less worried about them, although we had to walk on a disinfectant mat to clean our shoes due to the horse contact. And that was it: we were free to go.
We got landside and tried to contact our CouchSurfing hosts, Abby and Simon, but couldn't get a reply, so we found the bus into town instead. On the bus, we pretty much immediately experienced the famous friendliness of Kiwis. A lady who was sat next to us introduced herself and we passed the journey talking to her.
Once we arrived in town, we were dropped off outside a bookshop that had a sale on Lonely Planet guides, so we bought ourselves a nice new guidebook. We also found a phone box and called Simon again and arranged to meet him once he had finished work. As we only knew of two landmarks; the airport and the bookshop, he arranged to meet us outside the latter.
We went to the Vodaphone shop to ask about getting ourselves a SIM card for Jacob's mobile, but discovered that it wouldn't work yet as his phone was locked to the Orange network. The Vodaphone people directed us to a shop across the road who could unlock it, so we took it over there, imagining that it would be the work of a minute or two to type in the codes and get it sorted.
They looked at the phone and told us that it would be complicated so we would need to collect it tomorrow. So, no new phone for us today.
By now, we were incredibly hungry: it was time for food. We hadn't eaten since Wednesday and it was now Friday. Crossing the date line may have had something to do with that, but we still needed to eat, so we went to a kebab shop and got some nice big kebab type things to eat, which we did with gusto (and, in Jacob's case, chilli sauce).
Back to the bookshop, where we met up with Simon, who was no longer sporting the moustache he had had in the photo on the CouchSurfing website. Probably a good thing, all in all, as it had given him something of an identikit appearance.
We had just missed the bus that went past his house, so we went to sit down in a food court and nattered for a while until the bus was due, then went to his house where we were provided with cups of tea and chatted some more until the return of Abby. Well, we were provided with the means of making tea, which, for Kirsty, was simple enough: tap, kettle, teabags, mug. There was also an offer of some more interesting teas which Jacob liked the sound of. Simon, a coffee drinker, said that the girls like to drink tea and that there was an assortment of leaves and some tea making apparatus whose use he didn't fully understand...and that he wouldn't judge Jacob as any less of a man if that's what he chose to do. Right then.
After further nattering with Abby, Simon and his brother Rowan who was around for a little while before heading out for the evening, it was unanimously agreed that we would have barbecued things for tea, so we went to the local supermarket and bought various bits of meat, salad and bread and some beers, which Jacob and Simon set about cooking and drinking when we returned. Realising the natural order of things: i.e. that the absence of a Y chromosome effectively made them a hindrance at the grill whilst cooking was taking place, Abby assembled the salad and Kirsty had a very welcome shower - washing off Tahiti airport floor and suchlike, she re-emerged feeling much more human.
The food was good: steaks, barbecued eggs (there was a hotplate as well as a grill; it would be a bit messy otherwise), sausages, salad and bread. Some nice cold beers to wash it down with. We loved the South American food, but the return to the familiar can be a wonderful thing.
We were feeling surprisingly OK given the time differences our bodies were having to cope with. However, once we returned inside and were presented with comfy sofas and further beers, our bodies seemed to give up and switch off. Time for bed.
The absence of Simon and Abby's housemates meant we had the use of a room with a double bed, so we had a pretty respectable night's sleep. The following morning, we were woken in a somewhat unusual manner: across the street, the school were having a fundraising event, so various people were shouting to passing motorists. It took some time for us to establish what was being shouted, but the cries eventually resolved themselves into "caaaaar waaash!" A cockerel would be more traditional, but maybe that's how they do things over here?
Abby and Simon were going to be going away for the weekend to visit Simon's grandparents, but after breakfast (in which we discovered that Marmite is quite different over here) they gave us a lift to the hostel we would be staying in for the next couple of nights. We left the house in their rather dirty looking car which Abby had recently spilt a cappuccino over, all trying to avoid eye contact with the car wash people.
Dropped off at our hostel and having said our goodbyes, we set about checking in, with which we were assisted by a distracted sort of man with a walking stick and a Doncaster accent. Our room was in a shed like building at the back of the main house and we were informed by the landlord which windows we could safely open. We sorted out getting some laundry done and checking our e-mail, which could only be done after uninstalling the huge collection of assorted security programs with which another guest had helpfully bunged up the computer. We had the landlord's blessing for this: apparently one of his long term guests just wouldn't listen when told to stop adding so many damn safety filters that pretty much the entire internet was locked out. After freeing up the computer, we got a bus into town to go and collect Jacob's phone.
It turned out that the people we had left the phone with had not yet managed to unlock it. Furthermore, it turned out that this was because they hadn't done anything at all with it since we had left it with them the previous day. We were given it back with instructions to take it to a different shop further up the main street. We duly did so, wondering if we would have to wait a further 24 hours. The man at the shop we had been directed to took a quick look at the phone and told us to leave it with him for twenty minutes.
We filled the twenty minutes with browsing in shops, returned and were presented with our newly Vodaphone enabled mobile. Why this couldn't have been done the previous day was a bit beyond us, but at least it was done and, still only recently out of South America, it seemed to us to be a fast and efficient service.
We spent some of the afternoon doing a bit more browsing, then found a street performer. The Auckland International Busking Festival was taking place and various buskers and street performers were scattered around the town. This one was called "The Birdman" and he had a very silly act consisting of such tricks as juggling plastic bags, pouring water from a teapot into one of his nostrils and out of the other into his shoe, and a Houdini style escape from around ten metres of chain wrapped and padlocked about his person, coupled with a sack tied around his neck, waist and ankles.
The performance was good, but we were particularly impressed with how well he dealt with a couple of teenage girls, whose idea of heckling was a little more vicious than most. Still, he handled it well. A member of the crowd had a word with them at the end of the performance, which unsurprisingly was responded to with a torrent of teenage-girl-with-attitude-problem brand of abuse.
We decided that it would be useful to get some more admin things done and went back to the hostel to do that. Bored but up to date with some of the admin, we got on our freshly laundered glad rags and walked back into the nearby bit of town that had some pubs, found a nice looking one and got ourselves some food and a few drinks and listened to the live music. All very nice.
The following day, we had breakfast of bread and Vegemite and Jacob did the geek magnet thing again, this time attracting the attentions of a very dull man called Phil.
"Uuuh, uuh, hello...I don't think we've been introduced." No, no we haven't. That'll be because you've been overheard talking to other people, and, as such you've been avoided. You sound both boring and simple, and well, frankly, you're from Preston.
"I'm Phil. I'm from Preston. I'm thinking of living here and doing a masters in social work, maybe work in prisons." You'd get eaten alive sunshine. He carried on talking at length, but he didn't say anything else of any interest at all. Well, not unless you're interested in anti-viral software.
We escaped the conversation and got a bus into town again, where we looked briefly in computer shops with the idea of buying ourselves a laptop. We didn't find anything particularly useful at the time, but did find someone who could explain exactly how Wi-fi works. Yes, we are indeed of a generation who should understand such things and to be fair, we knew the basics, but it's sometimes useful to talk to a computer type. As long as it's not someone like Phil.
We also went to the ferry terminal to find out times and costs for our departure the following morning to Waiheke island, where we were going to be staying with another Couch Surfer. We were assured that there were always plenty of tickets for the ferry so we wouldn't need to book in advance, so we decided to buy tickets on the day in case of delays in getting to the ferry.
We had considered going to visit the Lion Brewery and decided that as our guidebook said that there was a tour at 3pm, we would go on that. We took a bus and walked to the brewery, arriving just in time for the tour. However, the place seemed deserted. We found a sign that told us to pick up the phone and speak to the security guard for access to tours. He told us that tours don't take place on Sundays. Damn.
This was particularly frustrating as the brewery building had a huge sign on it saying 'Daily Tours'. A much smaller sign on the door said 'Monday to Saturday'. We needed a new plan.
We decided to look around the nearby district of Newmarket, which Simon had told us was like a little town centre within the city. This turned out to be fairly accurate and we whiled away some time whilst it was raining by pottering around the shops and seeing what was on at the cinema. After all, it was a rainy Sunday afternoon: perfect cinema weather.
There were a couple of films that we quite fancied seeing which were on at the cinema, but not until later in the day. We thought we may as well go back into the main city centre and check the bigger cinema there, so we got the bus and found that both films we had been interested in seeing would be shown there, earlier but still not yet. We decided in the end on seeing "I am Legend", which, having both read the book, we were curious about seeing, and which had the advantage of being shown on an Imax screen.
With time to spare before the film, we went for food, stopping en route to watch another street performer, this one juggling whilst on a very tall unicycle. As Kirsty went up after the performance to give a few dollars, a small child approached the performer and said very earnestly "Thank you for juggling". Awww.
We went and fed on chicken at Nando's, then returned to the square area outside the cinema. Kirsty sat and read the guidebook for a while, making plans for the rest of our New Zealand adventure, whilst Jacob went in to the cinema building to find a toilet. Easily distracted as he is, he found a toilet but also air hockey and pool tables. Bad influence that he is, he talked Kirsty into leaving the planning for another time, and coming in to play. We had a few games of pool as the air hockey table was occupied.
We gathered popcorn and drinks and headed in to the cinema for the film, which was pretty good. Afterwards, we found that the air hockey table was free, so we had three games in which Kirsty discovered that she's pretty good at it. Or was it just beginners luck?
In buoyant spirits either way, possibly due to the excess of food of which our parents would disapprove, we made our way back to the hostel, did some Travel Pod updates and fought with the antiviral software that had been reinstalled, all whilst trying to avoid further conversation with Phil.
After that, it was time for bed, ready for our departure the following day for the sunny shores of Waiheke Island!
