Auckland, New Zealand Dec 11th-14th

Well, we were sad to say goodbye to Australia, but excited to say hello to New Zealand!
We knew that we’d be returning to Auckland again to fly home, so we only spent a few days here now, and most of that was devoted to admin work, such as rearranging flights and also trying to buy a car for the large amounts of driving we expected to do in NZ. We had a bit of a scare when a car we had agreed to buy, turned out to be not what it seemed. We checked with the registration, and found that it didn’t belong to the guy selling it, which means he was probably a dodgy car dealer/stealer. Anyway we decided to avoid it (even though it looked lovely, and was cheap) and go for a long term car-rental instead.

The other highlight of Auckland was my birthday (Andrew’s), and the 40th too! We had loosely planned to celebrate this with a bungee jump, and here we had the perfect opportunity. There is a massive tower in this city which boasts the ultimate jumping experience. I did it and they’re right, it is amazing.


This top heavy tower stands way above the rest of the city’s skyscrapers, and has a jumping platform some 192 m above the hard concrete. (For purists, it’s not technically a bungee jump at all, because you are attached to a vertical wire, to stop you blowing back into the tower or off into somebody’s office, and this wire also slows you down as you approach the ground.) But for me the difference is somehow not-so-important if you still need to step off a perfectly good building at a height where cars and boats look like toys. Perhaps the best moment of the trip so far was arriving on terra firma in a slightly wobbly state, to be hugged by my proud daughter.

Soon we were back on the road again, this time heading North to the Bay of islands, before our big southern adventure. Just an hour North of Auckland, we passed an unexpected treat – the Hundertwasser toilets in a tiny little town called Kewarawa. We love the freakish architecture of Friedrich Hundertwasser in Austria, and it turns out that he lived out his final years in this quiet corner of New Zealand, and found time to create some amazing roof gardens, and probably the most eclectic WC in the world. Apparently he was such a fan of this country, he even designed a new flag for New Zealand, which would represent the Maori culture more then the old commonwealth imagery of the present flag. It was never accepted, but here it is in all it’s glory.

Side note: If you ever want to capture a photograph of a constantly- moving flag, be prepared that it will involve at least 100 attempts, 10 minutes, 8 megapixels, and several impatient family members.