Around Auckland

Hey Everyone,
Here's a few pictures of my flat and some that I took when I first got to Auckland, and some that I took at night just a few days ago. Again, I decided to have some fun trying to spiff them up in HDR... I put the before & afters adjacent to each other.
I'm really enjoying this city. When I first got here I still haden't gotten my bag back -- the airline told me that it was now lost. But thanks to the numerous "Op-shops" (2nd hand stores) I was able to get a bunch of clothes for relatively cheap. Most of these are around the harbor (harbour), which is at the end of the main street, called Queen St.
My apartment is just across the street from AUT (where I'm going), which is just across the street from University of Auckland (where Alyse is going); the three line up parallel to and about a block away from Queen St. It's all terribly convenient -- I walk everywhere I need to go, but I probably walk more in LA between parking spaces and destinations.
Kiwis like to rag on Auckland for being overdeveloped, but by my standards it has quite a bit of parkland, clean streets, and for a city of 1.4 million is pretty quiet. Oh yeah-- Auckland has 1.4 million people. there are 4.2 million people in New Zealand. That's 1/3 of the population!
Hmmm... not too much of a cohesive story here... I think I'll put in a better one next time.

Cheers!

David

Luging & Abseiling

Monday, 2/16

After our Agrodome experience, still smelling a bit like sheep, our orientation group split up to either go zorbing or luging (can't really loose with those options). Zorbing, which involves rolling down a hill in a double-hulled plastic bubble filled with soapy water, involves swimming attire, which I soon found I was lacking at the time.
I realized around lunchtime that the only blue and green Kelty internal frame backpack, the one with the straps tucked in exactly the way I like to when checking it on a plane, currently sitting in the luggage compartment of our tour bus, was in fact not my blue and green Kelty internal frame backpack with its straps tucked in exactly the way I like to. I had grabbed someone else's bag at the airport.
This discovery hit me in waves.
"How Odd," I thought to myself, "My sandals aren't in the outer mesh pockets. I hope they didn't fall out!" A slight sinking feeling enveloped my stomach.
"Did I remember to put a luggage tag on this? I could have sworn I did." A slightly stronger sinking feeling, this time creeping its way up my esophagus.
"Oh bloody hell," Upon opening the pocket where I knew my trunks should reside, I found socks and a long sleeved t-shirt.
I thought about doing a quick inventory of the bag, running some quick arithmetic in my head, and deciding if it would be monetarily advantageous to not call the airline. But my conscience got the better of me, plus I was afraid of finding weird / illegal contents in there, so I didn't open it up any more. I got some help from the Australearn coordinators and we got the bag back to the Rotorua airport within the hour.
Happily I had happened to pack some clothes in my carry-on bag, and there were laundry facilities at the hostel, so I could wait it out till I got my bag back from the airline.
So, back to luging. After arriving, we rode up a gondola with a great view of Lake Rotorua, and hopped into our luges that would take us around halfway back down. The luges were not like luges in the olympics. They looked something like motor-less go-karts, with handle bars one could pull back to apply brake pads against the road. I tried each of three concrete tracks available, the last and hardest of which actually had a point where you could catch air!
At one point I decided to try jury rigging my camera to get some action shots. I had it point out from my chest by wrapping my strap around my shoulder and holding an IR shutter remote in my hand as I held on to the handlebars. Sadly, I sort of got the worst of two worlds -- I was unable to get any pictures from it, and holding the remote lead to some close calls with the sides of the downhill track.
Before we left, a few in the group decided to try a giant bungee swing as well, so I snapped a few pictures of them and posted them just for good measure. Afterward we headed back to Kiwipaka to relax and swap stories with the zorbers.

Tuesday, 2/17

The next morning, we all (groggily) climbed onto the tour buses and headed off to Waitomo for some spelunking. Spelunking, which I observed on the drive over sounds more like an onomatopoeia for sneezing underwater, is just a fancy word for exploring caves, and also remains one of my favorite nature-related things to do.
On went the wetsuits, gumboots (rain boots), and flashlight helmets. We had a quick demo on how to clip on / off the ropes, then tramped down into the abyss. The cave, called Haggas Honking Holes (at least by the company we went with), offered quite a bit of climbing and crawling. The whole thing was (happily) much more rigorous than I thought it would be, and involved a few different abseils. On one such abseil we went down a waterfall (nothing like a couple liters/second of icy mineral water splashing your face to wake you up!). In the photo of me I've still got somewhere around 10 meters of nothing below me. The cave took us in a long loop, and was a total blast. After we got out we were served copious amounts of pizza that we quickly finished off.
We got back to the hostel, relaxed, and started getting ready for our drive up to Auckland.

Okay, that's it for this entry.
Happy Easter / Passover / Spring equinox everyone!

--David