NZ all gone

So this brought us to the largest city in the South Pacific – Auckland. The rest of NZ frowns upon the JAFAs (Just Another F***ing Aucklander) but Auckland seems pretty decent for the country’s major city, not as windy as Welly and it certainly lives up to it’s name of City Of Sails – it’s estimated that 1 in 4 Aucklanders own a boat and there were loads of the buggers everywhere.

Note to anyone who may come across our blog and is thinking of going to NZ – DO NOT stay at the Auckland North Shore Top 10 Holiday Park, it is pants. The facilities were shoddy and staff very unhelpful. Top 10 is a group of independent parks across NZ that meet a certain standard, if those standards are not met and you are disappointed then you can expect a full refund. Despite several complaints across our 3 night stay we were not offered this by the flimsy management and so I am going straight to the top with this. If the weather hadn’t been so bad and the drop off point for our van hadn’t been just round the corner we’d have left for another site. Even if you’re not going to NZ then just let everyone know how rubbish this campsite was.

Due to the immense amount of rain & storms we didn’t get much chance to explore the city centre and the trendy areas of Newmarket (so no pictures of Auckland I’m afraid), but that can all be done in the future. To be honest we’d been so lucky with weather when we’d needed it and coupled with the fact that our stay in Auckland was over the Labour Day holiday weekend, so Sod’s Law guaranteed it being miserable outside. Still our hotel room turned out to be a suite so we just chilled with some tea & telly. I guess this is probably the most liveable city in NZ, closely followed by Napier. As we had some time to kill before our flight we thought we’d go to the cinema and chose an independant NZ movie called Out Of The Blue about a true story that happened on in a town called Aramoana, near Dunedin on the South island. The true story turned out to be some nutter called David Gray who massacred 13 people in this tiny town before armed police could catch him. Not the lightest of movies to watch before a 12 hour flight but it was shot with some very cool camera work and it felt graphic enough without going all Tarantino on the audience. If it gets released at home it’s well worth a look.

So, despite me nearly getting the van stuck in a car park that was too low on our last day and the shoddy campsite in Auckland, NZ has been fantastic – the best country in the world to visit by far, and probably the only country we could leave Blighty for. A final Kia Ora and thanks to all the Kiwis that made our month amazing, we’ll be back.

Next, we get to go back in time to another continent.