Thrills and Tempermental Weather in the City of Sails

Our adventure to New Zealand started in the airport with a heavy downpour and rather interesting customs requirements. They are quite anal about what is brought into the country – you can’t bring in food (somehow I managed to get in a can of Chef Boyardee which I am carrying to Singapore for my friend Lila who has been craving it since she moved there) and if your hiking gear or boots have any dirt from foreign land, be prepared to be charged a fine of $400! We (my brother came along with me for the NZ and Aussi portion of the trip) started the day by wandering around Auckland aka the City of Sails. It is a beautiful city with shores on all sides, wonderful beaches and West Haven Marina (largest marina in the southern hemisphere with over 2,000 boats).

Fear

Dictionary.com defines fear as

–noun a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain,etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling orcondition of being afraid.

It seems as though every corner I turn there is some sort of adventure or thrill to be had. What better place than NZ to face my fears and test the limits for adventure. My first encounter with adventure was riding the elevator in the Sky Tower (tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere). I can honestly say this was the first time in my life I was scared of riding an elevator, it shoots up 600 ft in about 40 seconds with a glass hole in the middle of the elevator floor so you can look down and the elevator door is open, with the city, for your viewing pleasure. I decided to do the Skywalk – which is a walk around the top of the tower on a 1.2 meter platform with no railings. Since I am in the country that invented adventure sports, might as well face my fears…

Even though the SkyWalk left me quite terror stricken, I achieved a new sense of bravery (let’s just say I would have never done this if I was not in NZ). Day 2 we did the Auckland Harbor Bridge Climb, another test of my fear of heights. We essentially climbed under the bridge, under the cars, around the bridge, and a mental enclosure above the cars. The first 15 minutes I walked slow as a snail, staring down to the water as imminent death if I were to fall…or staring above and feeling the vibrations of the cars driving over our heads. This bridge is the home of the legendary AJ Hackett Bungee jump. According to our Maori driver, AJ Hackett took a pal and a couple of chords to this bridge to bungee, the coast guard saw him and told him to get off the ledge of the bridge..and naturally he jumped off.

All in all, adventure sports are comparable to crack, you are scared shitless but you keep coming back for more. I couldn’t quite hack it and do the AJ Hackett bungee…but maybe I’ll change my mind in Queenstown (the adventure capital of the world).

Weather

This is a tough one, but the best way to describe the weather here is to say that Mother Nature is having a field day and is as fickle as Lady Gaga’s crazy outfits. I now completely understand when folks say you can experience all 4 seasons in one day in NZ. Below is a 15 minute glimpse of my time here..

1pm sun is out, yet it starts to drizzle

1:02pm I open my umbrella

1:03pm My umbrella is open, ready to go, the rain stops

1:04pm I close my umbrella

1:07pm the clouds recede and the sun comes out, I remove my North Face jacket b/c it is hot

1:10pm a large, ominous cumulonimbus cloud appears, with a strong breeze

1:11pm I put my jacket back on

1:12pm it starts raining again

1:13pm open the umbrella

Repeat cycle every 15 minutes

Interesting Tidbits about New Zealand

• The sales tax is a whopping 12.5% and is incorporated into the price of goods and could be increased to 15% fairly shortly.
• When I got my money exchanged at a local bank, they mocked me for carrying traveller’s checks (apparently extinct in New Zealand since they have rolled out a new debit/ATM card) Hopefully this will be available in the states once it works well in NZ. This is where I learned that they only have change in 10 cent increments (i.e – if you have a bill for something under 10 cents it gets rounded up or down), which makes me wonder why a store we walked into had a pen priced at $4.95..very strange.
• Sheep outnumber humans in New Zealand. Roughly a quarter of the population of NZ live in Auckland..so you can only imagine what the rest of the country looks like.
• Foreigners started calling people from New Zealand “kiwis” during WW1 based on their national bird.

We are now in Rotorua exploring geothermal parks, the countryside and Maori Culture..more in the next few days.