We spent the last couple of days in Auckland with our lovely “adoptive New Zealand parents”.
After taking looking at the New Zealand night sky for the last time, we left Scott Road at 5am – the trip to Auckland Airport took just under an hour.
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For the next few weeks, Barbara and I will be traveling in Australia. I hope to update this blog a little more often then. :)
So far we had a couple of nice weeks in Auckland and Bay of Islands.
Long time no post…
Well, big news over here:
Sadly our time in New Zealand will be coming to an end (for now anyways) and Babs and I will be moving back to Germany!
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This year I had the pleasure to be on Emirates EK413 on my trip from New Zealand to Germany. This flight number stands for the connection from Auckland to Dubai via Sydney. Aircraft: Emirates Airbus A380! Travel time: 19hr 45min… (plus an additional 7 hours from Dubai to Germany)
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I found the following calendar on an iPhone. Two of the translations of NZ holidays are just hilarious!!! I will try to translate it back into english for those who don’t speak German. (continue)
I’ve been in the Hawkes Bay area about 3 or 4 times since I live in New Zealand. – And I’ve never made it to Cape Kidnappers yet. :(
At first I didn’t know that you could only walk to the cape at low tide. Then low tide was always at the wrong time of the day (well, at least not when it was convenient for me) or I didn’t have enough time to do a 5 hour hike.
This time I was spending five days up here – so this time it was bound to happen, right?
Well……… I tried.
– More after the break :)
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We went to Castlepoint last night and I spent the evening and early morning taking pictures :)
Too bad though, that they switch off the light of the lighthouse at 7am!
Mike has been doing a pot-luck dinner party at his home here in Wellington every Tuesday Night for more than 11 years now. We did a few little interviews on the 11th birthday. Here’s the Tuesday Night Dinner 11th Birthday Movie!
Road Rules in New Zealand don’t allow you to ride any motorbike with more than 50cc, if you just have a ‘normal’ car driver licence. (That’s the same in Germany, it’s the same almost anywhere in the world).
This means, I can’t ride Barbaras 150cc scooter (even after asking her for approval ;-) ).
In windy, hilly Wellington anything less than 150cc just isn’t any fun to ride on. So I decided to get the motorbike license.
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After leaving Wellington on Thursday evening we went up SH2 via Masterton towards Napier. We stopped about 1.5 hours before Napier to spend the night in our comfy van.
After breakfast at Napiers Waterfront on Friday morning, we went back on the road driving up to Gisborne. A short stop at almost wind-still Tutira lakes gave us some wonderful photo opportunities.
Gisborne was pretty much dead on Good friday, so we spent our time at the beach and decided to have a movie night. We watched Clash Of The Titans.
After some grocery shopping on Saturday we went to see the East Coast Museum of Technology. The word “Museum” is probably a little bit (or hugely!) over-exaggerated, because it looked more like a junk yard. Stuff EVERYWHERE! Anyway: There were some quite neat photo motives.
On our way back, we stopped at the Mahia peninsula and spend Saturday to Sunday night, having fresh fish and chips (yes, even I had fish!).
Easter Sunday we stopped at Tutira lakes again – this time way to windy and cold, so we decided to head on to Napier, where we spent the afternoon at the spa pools. As there was hardly any traffic that evening, we made great time and got back to Wellington around 9:30pm. NO wait! We didn’t notice that NZ switched back to standard time after daylight savings! It was only 8:30pm! :-)
Easter pics (click for full size!) :
Here are some highlights, but I put up more photos at my web gallery:
Plans are made to change them, right?
Well, so we did! :)
Originally we planned to:
* take the Overlander train from Wellington up to Auckland on the 19th.
* have a rental car for a week, driving around coromandel
* spend Christmas with Barbaras family and friends in Auckland
* fly down to Christchurch on the 26th
* rent a campervan and drive around the south island for 2 weeks
* take the train from Christchurch to Picton
* return to Wellington via SoundsAir on the 9th of January 2010
Well….. since two weeks of campervan rental fee was about 1/4th of the price of an excellent offer for a new (used) car/minivan, we decided to go ahead and just buy & build our own “campervan”. :-)
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Babs ordered some macro filters to put in-front of a 52mm lens. I used them with my Canon EF 70-300mm.
Here are some of the results. Arn’t those neat? :)
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A few people asked me lately which airline (and route) I would choose to go from Europe to New Zealand.
Well, to be honest I don’t know… :) But I can try to outline my experiences for the airlines/routes I’ve flown so far – which are only Lufthansa, Air New Zealand and Qantas.
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