Home Stretch

So I'm in Auckland today. It's raining so I don't quite feel up to my normal walking tour of the city plus I decided to sleep in today which was the first time in a month which was nice. Tomorrow I'm off to Rotorua to go zorbing. I will have some free time there so will be able to walk around there for a bit, maybe go to the mud baths. The hostel operates a free tour of the city which I signed up to do on Tuesday. The tour goes up the sky tower (the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere at 394 meters or so, just under a quarter mile), goes to Mt. Eden (an active volcano), over the Harbor Bridge, and other places.The hostel also has free dinner and since I booked it with a certain backpackers travel place I get a free super-size which is good.

Last night I caved and bought a hamburger as I'd been craving one for sometime. The only reason I did it is because I saw the place as I was walking from the bus station and you could just tell that it was an iconic place. Great food, great prices, great portions. It was called the White Lady and has only closed once since it's opening in the 40's due to Auckland losing power. It was open again by the next morning after the museum brought a generator over to help them out.

Wellington was a fun city. I wish I had more time to spend here but I guess I'll just have to come back. Saw lots of cool Lord of the Ring filming sites and on the train ride up to Auckland I saw Mt. Doom. Not sure which one it was as they were all snow covered making it a lot less Doom-y. ("...represented by Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Ruapehu, both active volcanoes in New Zealand." courtesy of Wiki) In any event, the train ride was a little interesting as the train was late and then had electrical problems. The solution, put everyone on a bus and then send a train south from Auckland to intercept us. We got on the train right around Mount Doom and took it the rest of the way and had a short power outage just outside of Auckland. I missed my free dinner last night which wasn't so bad as I went to the White Lady.

I might go to the Auckland zoo and get my picture taken with a Cheetah as I've always wanted to do that. They are very big on animal encounters here, and I would be remiss if I came all the way out here and didn't see a kiwi (bird). I bought a kilogram of kiwis (fruit) which cost $1 NZ so that equates to 2.2 lbs of fruit for $0.63 which is pretty tough to beat. The third type of kiwi is a person from New Zealand. Apparently the kiwi farms got hit by a hail storm which ruined lots of crops so kiwi's might be more expensive soon.