Just another quick post, since we have lost our free internet connect, and are once again paying for it when possible. We left Auckland on Saturday, and picked up a rental car. Driving on the left is not so bad, but the steering wheel is on the right side of the car, and so the car itself feels backwards. We hiked ONe Tree Hill, just south of the city, and it was beautiful. We then drove along the Bay of Plenty, stopping in Thames. Yesterday we arrived in Rotorua, home of thermal springs, and stinky egg sulphur smells. Today we are off to see Hell’s Gate, a large thermal area, and then head south again. More updates to come…

So we’ve been in Auckland for a couple of days now, and we went out exploring a little bit, although it was mainly to check out different rental car companies. Mostly we have been holed up in our room at the hostel, doing some trip planning and lots of sleeping. I think a lot of it is jet lag, although like Sarah has pointed out, it actually feels like what time it is. It’s just the wrong day. I think we are also tired from the flight. That long on an airplane is draining. Anyway, we are renting a car tomorrow, and heading out to some pretty cool stuff (we hope). I think we need to get away from big cities for a while.

we’re tired

Originally uploaded by nutty bunny.

jet lag is a bitch

Fire & Water

Originally uploaded by nutty bunny.

a cool sculpture in Auckland, with water pouring over the sides and flames coming from the top

So I awoke this afternoon (yes, afternoon, don’t pretend to be surprised) to find that mike had discovered some free internet! Hooray! We’re staying in the city garden lodge in Parnell, a fashionable suburb just outside Auckland. The house used to be the Queen of Tonga’s many years ago. Now all of the rooms have been converted into bedrooms, save the kitchen, dining and lounge areas. There are a plethora of showers, toilets and washrooms; most of these being entirely separate rooms. Currently we’re in our very cute vaulted ceiling, peach and blue painted, incredibly cheery room, which is the most luxurious room we’ve had so far this trip (no offense meant to our other hosts of course). There is a double bed, which is a bit small for mike and I, but we are absolutely in love with it despite this. It is by and far the most comfortable bed I think I have ever slept in. The mattress is some soft foamy stuff, and it’s piled with 3ft of blankets weighing several pounds. Which is good, because it’s a bit chilly here, definitely a moderate to cool spring with a bit of occasional rain thrown in. It’s so nice here though, and everyone is friendly but not nosy, which I think is perfect.

Yesterday once we got into our room around 11, we took very hot showers and very long naps in order to recover from our very very long flight. (I actually managed to sleep most of the time, thank god.) About 7pm we got up and headed out to find some dinner. The little info book that came with the room suggested a place called Wisconsin Burger, which I thought would be funny and also delicious. Supposedly it was located just a short walk from the side street the hostel is on to the main drag, Parnell Rd. Well, we walked quite a way down Parnell one way, passing many sushi, thai and trendy restaurants out of our budget, but no Wisconsin Burger. So we turned around and walked even further the other way, up into the less trendy area of Parnell I guess. Once we’d walked another 5 or 10 minutes we decided that there was no longer a Wisconsin Burger. Across the street from us was Al & Pete’s Burgers & Chips; a small takeaway type place with a few small tables inside.

The menu seemed okay, and there were a variety of things listed under the heading “burgers” on the menu board. Actually, I thought the “burgers” they offered were a bit strange; ham, egg, steak and egg, seafood, not things that we’d put on our burgers back home. But I found one that was bacon and cheese, listed under burgers, so I thought I was ordering a bacon cheeseburger. Mike ordered a Chili Burger, we both ordered some chips, and waited for our orders. When the came up we realized that we could’ve easily split one bag of chips, but they were oh so good it didn’t matter. We opened up our paper-wrapped sandwiches to fine that “burger” didn’t mean what we thought in meant. Mike’s was okay, a real hamburger on a bun, but with salsa – not chili. He says it was good, but not at all what he was expecting. Apparently chili = salsa, perhaps with chilis in it? Anyway, he made out better than I did, because I had a number of discoveries with my meal. 1) Burger doesn’t necessarily mean a beef patty; it’s apparently anything they can think of placed on a hamburger bun. This explained the weird listings on the menu. 2) Here, bacon isn’t anything at all similar to bacon. Closer to thinly sliced ham, but not quite. Sort of fatty, salted, and on the tough side, but not at all the burnt crispy deliciousness of american bacon. The sandwich that I got was this sliced ham stuff, piled 3 high, slathered in cheese, with lettuce and tomato and some sort of sauce similar to a bbq type thing. Not a hamburger, not bacon, and the cheese was a lot of cheese.

We ate it regardless, and after the initial shock it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t finish mine though, because it was a lot of “bacon”. Walking back down Parnell to where we’d seen an irish pub, we mused that they probably are horrified by what we consider bacon, or chili maybe. From here on out I am going to be very careful what I ask for, and make sure that I fully understand what I’m ordering. Luckily I’m not that picky, but I really don’t want any more food surprises either.

I don’t like flying, it quite frankly scares me. I’m not as bad as I used to be, but I still get pretty anxious when I get on a plane. Plus I don’t really fit well in the seats. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I got on our flight to New Zealand. And it really wasn’t that bad. Ok, the seats were cramped, and we couldn’t move or stretch out, because it was a completely full flight. But the take off was smooth, and I realized that you don’t feel the flying quite as much in a bigger airplane. And it was big, a 747, one of the two-story planes. (we passed the stairs on the way to our seats) And they took care of us. Every seat had a little video screen that had a remote control tucked into the armrest that you could pull out and select what you wanted to watch. They had about 25-30 movies, a bunch of TV shows, some programs about NZ, and even video games! The TV remote turned sideways and became a game controller. Sarah and I both played a bunch of Tetris. They also had pretty good food, and free wine. Flying internationally apparently has benefits.
Of course, it also lasted forever. I set the timer on my watch to count down the 12 hours and 15 minutes we were going to be in the air. At some point in the flight, after I had played video games, eaten dinner, watched half of a rugby match and an entire movie, I tried getting some sleep. I drifted off for probably a few hours, woke up and looked at my watch. Five hours to go. So I went back to sleep for what seemed like a long time. I woke up again thinking we must be close, and looked at my watch again. Three hours to go. We were never getting off that plane. After an eternity, we finally started our descent into Auckland, only to have the captain come on and say that we were having technical diffculties, and would be holding for about 5-10 minutes while they figured it out. Of course, my first thought was that the landing gear was broken, and we’d be making an emergency landing. But, sure enough, about 5 minutes later, the captain told us the problem was fixed, and we proceeded to make a rather smooth landing.
Maybe someday I’ll be better with flying. Maybe.

Hi all, just a quicky to let everyone know that we made it to New Zealand and they even let us in! They were dubious about our boots, tent, and snackbars, but eventually determined that neither we nor our stuff posed any great threat to the ecosystem. Customs is indeed a weird thing. But we’re in, and even have exchanged our us dollars for cute nz funny money! (They have the equivalent of lunies and tunies, for those familiar with canada.) Anyway, we just got the one minute warning, times up for the interweb!

As Mike mentioned, parking meters were outragously expensive in San Francisco. The following is a list of things that we bought to get change for the meters, because we never had enough.
1) By fisherman’s warf, a postcard. Mike managed to get an additional dollar from the lady.
2) On Haight St, a semsame honey candy bar. I managed to get an additional dollar from the guy.
3) Donuts from Happy Donut. Okay, this one we also just wanted donuts, but mike was able to get a dollars worth of change (which only got us 20 minutes on the meter).
The only nice thing about it is that mostly we had no trouble finding an open spot to park in. Oh, and Boston should take a cue from California (and other states) and have the meters take more than just quarters. Out here they take everything but pennies, gives new life to nickles and dimes!

We spent the middle of the week in San Francisco, and it was great. It’s really a beautiful city. It actually reminds me of Boston in some ways. The physical size is similar, and even some of the architecture is reminiscent. (The occasional brick building was very refreshing.) We drove around the city, wandered around Golden Gate Park, climbed the hills called Twin Peaks, and got an up close look at the Golden Gate Bridge. By the way, the bridge and the park are not next to each other. They’re actually a couple of miles apart. We also went to Chinatown and had some of the best Chinese food I’ve ever had. And the next night we went to Berkely for some Chicago-style pizza that was some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. (Thanks Colleen and Saskia!)
My only complaint about San Francisco is the parking. I thought it was bad in Boston, but there are meters in the city that literally give you 5 minutes for a quarter. Unreal. Still, we enjoyed it, and were sad to go.
We left on Friday and drove down to Monterey, which is a nice little seaside town. We got out at the docks and were met with the echoing calls of the seals that were all around the harbor. I took some videos that I will try to post soon, and I caught the seals playing around, swimming, and barking. I don’t think the sound on the videos really captures the way the sounds of their calls were just reverberating around the harbor.
We then drove down the coast a ways, with the intention of camping somewhere in Big Sur for the night. The first place we checked out was a state campground. We pulled into this dusty parking area, and went up to the booth that was manned by an unhappy looking park employee. (ranger?) He proceeded to tell us that the caping was in a field about a third of a mile away, the only facilities were the crappy looking bathrooms next to the parking area, and don’t drink the water. After pondering the rattle snake warnings signs posted on the booth, we decided to keep going. About a mile away we stopped at a privately run, very clean and very friendly campground. They had spaces for camping, showers, and even laundry rooms. We were sold. It was very nice, and also very cold, and the ground was very hard. So while we enjoyed ourselves, we were not well rested.
The next day was another long trek back to LA, and we got completely burnt out on such long drives. When we’re in New Zealand, if we have a car, we are going to limit the amount of driving we do in a day.
So this is it, we leave tonight, and soon we will be in New Zealand. I don’t think it will completely sink in until we are there, but it is very exciting.

We drove up the coast yesterday, from LA up to San Francisco. It was a beautiful drive (mostly), and it also took a couple of hours longer than I thought it would. I think it was because we did a stretch that I thought would be coastal, but in fact only went through farmland. See, there are two highways that overlap each other that run up either along or near the coast, highways 1 and 101. (and as Sarah mentioned in her last post, people refer to them as the 1 and the 101. They do that with all the highways, excuse me, freeways, here. I was often corrected when I lived here. I’d say route 10, and someone would say it’s called the 10. Weird.) Anyway, 1 runs along the coast most of the way, but overlaps with 101 through some stretches a little farther inland. The map showed one section that split off from 101 and ran towards the water. Well, it only wound slowly through these really flat farms. Some of the farms seemed to be growing grass(?) and some were growing lettuce and maybe cabbage. And they all smelled kinda funny. Like the veggies were a little dank.
The coastal parts were very beautiful. There are some places where you drive along beaches and there are ranches on the other side of the street. It must be incredible to live on one of those ranches: “I’m just going to ride the horse down to the water.” There are also passes through the mountains, which Sarah pointed out are not like mountains back home. They are not covered with trees and green, but are instead rocky outcroppings with only hiints of dry vegetation.
Then the really spectacular length of the drive happens in the stretch of coast south of Big Sur. (we’re not sure if Big Sur is actually a town, or an area, or a mountain…) This is a winding, curving road that hugs the side off the mountains that drop off in great cliffs into the sea. It was especially breathtaking, because we hit that area as the sun was starting to set. Of course, that also made for much more difficult driving, as we had to fight the sun from our eyes and try to stay safely on the road. The sun then sank behind a giant, solid bank of clouds that had the look of a mountain range far off over the water. Sarah said it looked like an enormous, slow moving tsunami.
The the sun went down. And it got dark.
We were mostly through the mountains, but not quite. And let me say that driving twisty roads next to a cliff with no streetlights in the dark is an excersise in concentration. It’s also very tiring. But we made it through, and finally reached SF, and now we are here and excited to go exploring.