Well, I finally made it to the promised land.  Thirty something hours of flying but it actually wasn’t too bad since I had an entire row on the LA-Sydney flight all to myself.  Armrests up, engage fetal position (its the only way to fit on those three seats) and presto.  The uneven surface of the three seats would cause me to wake up every hour or so in a sharp pain due to awkward pressure points.  I just rotated like a grandpa and went back to sleep.  Even with this awkwardness, I still slept for about 7 hours of that flight and felt pretty fresh when I landed in Sydney.   (Oh and the food on the Virgin Australia flight was actually pretty tasty.) A few more hours and I made it to Auckland without much of an issue.  I like the city so far; beautiful sites and folks everywhere are pretty nice. The hostel I ended up at is packed with Europeans, which is kind of a surprise.   Also, just about everyone is doing a 6 month or longer stint of travel.  Some were even doing up to two years!  Mind boggling.

So I booked my own room at the hostel to be able to get some good sleep these first two nights and recover from jet lag as quickly as possible.  The first night was great and I was up and ready to roll.  I woke up early, researched the city a bit more and caught the bus into town.  Google maps is a hell of an app; it worked great in Auckland with the public transit system.  I decided to visit the island of Rangitoto.  This island didn’t exist 600 years ago and was formed by a volcano spewing  lava for ~200 years leaving behind this funky little island about 30 minutes away (via ferry) from downtown Auckland.  There are no vehicles except for tractors pulling trams for the tourist folks, but I passed that up and just hiked up the landscape myself.  Man am I out of shape.  I’ll blame it on the heavy pack though.  Too many snacks and water in the darn thing, plus a bunch of electronics I should have left behind.  Silly me.  I made it to the top, but man was I gassed.  The views were pretty neat and there was a great view of the city from the island.   There is also a huge crater in the middle that looks really neat in person or with a picture from up in the sky.  The photos I took were not wide enough so they turned out really crappy.  I posted some of the pictures, minus the crater.  There were also some lava caves that I wandered through.   They were pitch black and the pictures I took didn’t turn out that well, but I still posted a couple above.

After making it back into the city, I made my way towards the skytower where they have the sky jump and the skywalk.  Those were closed by the time I got there, but I did end up grabbing some dinner at the tower.  Decent food but overpriced.  At least you get a nice view.

Ended up playing Uno with two British folk, a German, a Canadian, and a French.  Talk about some interesting conversations and some intense gaming.  (I’ve been out of the Uno loop for so long I didn’t realize there was another world of rules out there.)   Bed after this around 1:30 and then 5am hits.  Let me preface this with my enounter with the neighbor earlier that evening.  A guy in his 40s was walking to his room and asked me if I had a razor blade.  Nope sorry dude.  “Are you a nurse or doctor?”  Nope again “mate”.  Turns out he was welding and a piece flew at his face, he didn’t take care of the wound and it was becoming infected so he decided to cut his wound open with a knife and fix it himself.  For the record I did offer him some ointments/items from my first aid kit but he rejected them saying he doesn’t use that stuff.  Well, your infection is starting to make more sense now.   Ok so back to 5am and the loudest. Neighbor. Ever! To top it off these walls are like paper – no insulation.  I am awoken by the sounds of someone either having a horrible shitting experience, painfully rough sex, or giving birth to a baby next door. I’m still not sure.  Stomping, moaning, screaming, blades hitting the floor, walls gettting kicked, sinks getting slammed.  It was intense.   Sounds like the neighbor was cutting at the wound on the side of his face again to fix his infection!  Croiky.

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Cheers