We made it to our 51st country and just spent 5 days in the biggest city – Auckland, New Zealand. Auckland is a big city of 1.5 million people but it doesn’t really feel that big. We stayed at the Crown Plaza downtown and and the “big” city never felt that busy. The whole country only has about 5 million people which is one of those places where it is weird to think that our home state of Washington has a lot more people (8 million). It rained the first couple of days we were there but we still were able to see the town during the sun breaks. It is a beautiful city but I don’t have the crazy beautiful pics that I had in my last posts about the Cook Islands and Tahiti. Like most big towns, we started with the “free” walking tour on the first day to understand the city a bit better. This combined with a trip to the art museum and the history museum got us totally in the New Zealand mindset after being in tropical island mode for a couple of weeks.
Auckland is a water town and it reminds us a bit of Seattle. Sailing is huge here and they are always excited to tell you that they are the current owner’s of the America’s Cup. There are several ferries to go to nearby islands. We took a boat trip one day to a cute beach town of Devonport and another day we went to the island of Waiheke to do some wine tasting. It reminded us a lot of the San Juan Islands in Washington State. We could really have stayed a while on these small islands seeing the birds, tasting the wine and enjoying the island lifestyle but this is our first trip to this country so we can’t linger on one spot. There is a lot to see in New Zealand and we can’t stop in the first spot we liked.
We were in Europe last summer during the playoff run for the Seattle Mariners. Seattle sports fans don’t get playoffs much so we were disappointed to missing most of the games due to the time zone difference. But now our Seattle Seahawks our having a good year and New Zealand is only 21 hours ahead of Seattle (so 3 hours offset, practically speaking). So, we were able to watch our team advance to the Superbowl in the afternoon in an Auckland sports bar filled with Seahawk fans. It was really cool to find a hometown atmosphere being so far from home.
Overall, we felt that Auckland would be a great place to live but it really isn’t much of a tourist town. If there for longer in slightly better weather, this town has loads of outdoor hiking and biking that could be very fun. We saw the few sites and are now ready to explore the other attractions of New Zealand. We have rented a car and will spend the next few days driving south down the North Island, and eventually the South Island, and seeing as much as we can. I think the next few weeks will provide us some more opportunities for some incredible photos like we had in our tropical island visits.
