Back to Auckland

Sunday, July 22

For some unknown reason, last night Stephen and I elected to have breakfast at 8am. That meant we had to be up before 8am. Not our brightest decision, because as 7:55 rolled around, we did not want to get up. Fortunately, this was a casual bed and breakfast, so pajamas were perfectly appropriate to wear to breakfast. Stephen had an omelet with nothing in it and I had toast with local New Zealand jam. Not the most overwhelming breakfast, but it worked.

This was one of the uglier mornings we had seen, with strong winds and harsh rain falling pretty steadily. Our hosts were kind enough to call the company we had booked our morning tour with, only to confirm that the tour had been cancelled due to poor weather. This meant we could take our time this morning, re-packing our backpacks, reading the paper, and finally heading out the door around 11am. This worked out well as we had originally been a little worried about returning to Auckland in time to turn in the car.

Around noon, right before we headed into the mountains to get back to Auckland, the car began to beep, alerting us to the fact that we were running low on gas, something we were already aware of. At one point, it even claimed we had 0 km of gas left. Good news, we never had to push the car or walk to find a gas station - we made it, despite my stress. Stephen, of course, was never worried. Once we filled half the tank, (we were supposed to return it empty), we were good to go. Again, we had pictures documenting this exciting time, and again, the computer doesn't want us to have them.

By 2pm, we were back in Auckland and had returned the car, problem free. Our initial plan had been to do the Auckland sky tower, which at the moment, was completely fogged in. To put things in perspective, we couldn't see the top of the tower from our 25th floor hotel room. Imagine how bad the views would be from there. Instead, we dropped our bags, grabbed some lunch in the all-asian food court, and hit the streets, despite the rain.

Here was our really good lunch - for once, Stephen used chopsticks and I used a fork.

We then wandered through Auckland, electing to stop in a local chocolate shop, with a huge array of specialty chocolates, including some Sabrina-safe ones such as dark chocolate and cardamom and dark chocolate with honeycomb.

We each walked out with a few chocolates each - Stephen's were much more photo-worthy than mine. He opted for the unique chocolates you don't normally find, while I went for the ones I could eat. On the left is a white chocolate feijoa (a local fruit described as half apple, half lime, but looks like a kiwi), the middle is a white chocolate passionfruit - the chocolate expert's favorite, and the right is a lemon lime bitters and white chocolate. Apparently, coloring white chocolate is an unusual technique, found mainly in New Zealand.

Having purchased our chocolates, we then braved the weather to go see the harbor, which Stephen said was worth seeing, given it was only ten minute walk away (had we not stopped in so many shops). Looking at the pictures - I'm debating whether it was really worthwhile to cross the street and leave the covered walkways. I even considered demanding a purchase of jewelry to compensate for getting us wet.

After the great views at the harbor, we made our way back to the hotel, stopping in more local souvenir shops, but buying nothing beyond our chocolates. Finally, we returned, changed into dry clothes, and had a mellow evening with more movies and a dinner of sandwiches (we went grocery shopping, and once again, made an entire loaf of peanut butter sandwiches - in preparation for tomorrow's all-day wilderness trip).

Here is one final shot of the sky tower, which you can only see through the fog and mist because it is illuminated. We opted to crawl into bed early tonight, as tomorrow we have a 7am flight to Queenstown.