Tag: Aukland

By Nora_Wolcott

After weeks of not sleeping in my own bed, travelling from the Southernmost tip of NZ up to the Northern Coast, I've been overwhelmed with the scenery of this beautiful country. If I'm honest, I was also fairly run down by the end of my weeks of travelling, sleeping in hostels and waking up at the crack of dawn to tramp up mountains. Therefore, my decision to take a weekend in for myself wasn't a hard one. After a few days back in class I realised I had quite a bit of work to catch up on, and basic mundane things (groceries, laundry, etc.) that I had been neglecting. This week is the first week I've spent completely in the city of Auckland, and it's given me time to reflect on the merits of the city itself.

After travelling almost the entirety of  this country, I can conclusively say that Auckland is the only real city in the whole place. However, it is a surprisingly major hub for such a little island, with a population of 1.4 million, almost twice as large as Washington, DC. This is apparent simply by looking at the architecture, all glassy skyscrapers, not the collection of townhouses I've grown to love back home. The most striking element of the skyline is clearly the Sky Tower, whose luminescent spire is reminiscent of Toronto. However, there is a lot more to the city than these touristy landmarks; just as in DC I've come to favor AdMo and U St over the White House and Capitol, there are many hidden gems within this major metropolitan area. For instance:

Queen Street, while not exactly a hidden gem, Queen St is the Broadway of Auckland, a major shopping hub just 5 minutes from my apartment. I'll never get tired of the endless Vietnamese street food, Kiwi boutiques and Indian groceries that this street has to offer. ...continue reading "The City Itself"

By Nora_Wolcott

This weekend I embarked on my first independent trip, on which I would attempt to surmount the entire Northern tip of New Zealand. I began this endeavor, accompanied by three of my closest international friends, at a small run-down rental car agency in Auckland Central. The man at the desk handed us the keys to an old rickety hatchback, in which we would drive the 6 hours up to Cape Reigna, and in which I would get my first taste of the winding roads of the New Zealand bush.

We began our weekend with a trip to the Glowworm Caves of Waipu, which took us up a narrow, precipitous stretch of dirt road that our hatchback was just able to navigate in the dark. When we reached the caves we were the only people visible for miles, and the moments approaching the cave's entrance felt vaguely like the part of the horror movie when the audience is begging the protagonist not to go in. Inside the narrow entrance the cave blossomed into a jumble of stalactites and stalagmites, and as we turned the lights from our phones off a smattering of fluorescent spots revealed themselves. The flecks of blue-green were, of course, Arachnocampa luminosa, thousands of glow worms nestled into the rock. As we made our way deeper into the cave, wading in the watery floor, I was startled to find long gray eels slithering around my feet. This was my introduction to the fauna-filled weekend to come.

Day 2 of our adventure started in the Bay of Islands, home to 144 different islands, almost all of which we would see that day on a 4 hours ferry trip encompassing the length of the Bay. This was by far the most memorable (if pricey) leg of our trip, as a couple hours into the tour we happened upon a pod of bottlenose dolphins. Undulating Bottlenoses jumped through the wake of our ferry, and the crowd of onlookers audibly gasped when a baby dolphin shot several meters into the air behind us. Our captain informed us that his name was Flash, and he was part of the 25-member pod that we had discovered. In the midst of all this excitement, a small fairy penguin surfaced unceremoniously just a few feet ahead of me, and looked back with indifference before diving back into the surf. We rounded out the day with a trip to Rainbow Falls, which proved to be quite a beautiful secluded spot, and that night we fell asleep to the sound of water hitting rock after a 27 meter free fall.

...continue reading "Driving Into the Sea"