Auckland Anonymous

Arrived in Auckland on Monday 8th August at 5.30am. We’ve now lost a day due to the international date line and I hope your Sunday the 7th was a bit more eventful than our non-existent day. Our hostel was just outside Auckland in a place called Eden Park which is just like Bearsden on the outskirts of Glasgow. We managed to get booked in (despite telling them we were arriving 12 hours later), the room was probably one of our smallest yet and swinging a cat in it was really difficult but we were only here for 3 nights. We still managed to phone Chris’s Mum to wish her many happy returns (found out a few days later that we actually phoned the day before as we mixed up our time difference by 12 hours the wrong way).

We walked into the city centre which was really small in comparison to most places we have been recently. It is dominated by the Sky Tower which you can see from most places around the city. The weather was cloudy but the rain managed to stay off. We were thinking of travelling around NZ in a camper van and had a look at a few different places for prices. At lunchtime we went into a little takeaway shop for a Chicken Pie….the lady was oriental and we ended up with a “Chicken Thigh” - a fried leg of chicken…..despite my disappointment it was fairly tasty trying to eat it through our laughter.

Later we went into the Auckland Art Gallery and saw a lot of interesting pictures by New Zealand artists before heading back to the hostel. We ate in that night - a novelty for us home cooked food!! All I can say with a joint effort the chilli was great….but maybe it was just the wine. There was a rather strange woman staying at the hostel and she gave two young trainee doctors a grilling about substances being used illegally by the police…..needless to say they left fairly quickly after that and we weren’t long behind them. An early night was had to catch up on the travelling.

Day 2 and we booked our camper van - the only issue is being stuck in a small space with Chris and his control over the music for 3 weeks. After dinner we headed out to the local Irish Bar….I know I said never again but there was a quiz on and we both fancied it. Well we had a couple of drinks before the quiz started and most teams had 4 people or more in them…..there was only Chris and I in ours. We were lagging behind in the first round when we got 6 points….then it gradually got worse…but we hadn’t used our two joker rounds. At least 15 questions were related to NZ so we could use that as an excuse until we saw our grand total of 45 points. We made a hasty exit out of the pub as we were by far the worst team. Chris is adamant that this was a stitch up to make the Kiwi’s look more intelligent than they actually are.


On the Wednesday we decided to climb Mount Eden - despite it’s name it is only 196m high. We had excellent views of the city from here despite the grey skies. We walked into the city and spent most of our day wandering aimlessly around the shops in the centre and quayside. As we were walking home we watched someone jump, JUMP!! out of the sky tower!! My heart was in my mouth but Mr Reilly said he would do it, I even volunteered to take pictures but I am still waiting!!….Still Waiting. Had a great night in with Bangers & Mash and a bottle of sparkling wine - we were the talk of the hostel!


I wouldn’t put Auckland on top of your list of must see places but we managed to have a good laugh, the people were friendly and the city centre is quite compact.