New Zealand! 18 months ago; a wild dream. A year ago; a distant possibility. Six months ago; a legitimate trip. Two days ago; a one way ticket from Los Angeles Airport. We made it across the world, across the equator and onto the volcanic rock the size of Colorado that we will call home for the next four months. Our first couple days, the topic of this post, were spent in a downtown Auckland hostel fighting jet lag and the joys of a 12 person dorm filled with 18 year old German kids (a post lamenting about our old age and time at the hostel is in the days to come).

So once we finally made it to Auckland after about 22 hours of time in an airplane what did we do? Besides sleep you mean? We had a hostel booked for three nights in walking distance to the downtown and we tried to see as much of the city that we could for free. Our first full day led us to buying breakfast groceries from an Indian man named “Eddy” who upon learning we had a friend from Assam gave us a killer deal on our eggs and veg and even hooked us up with a cheap Indian mean from the joint next door that night!

A view of downtown from the highest point in the city, Mt Eden

After a breakfast from Eddy’s Market, we spent day 2 in NZ seeing the downtown, including Lindsay indulging my man crush on sail boats. We also tried to do much of the tourist stuff in the city center like the fish market and the wharf area. The highlight of the day definitely being all of the sailboats, which WILL be my midlife crisis. I just need to learn how to drive one!

Day 3 turned into a bit more of an adventure than we bargained for. A 15km(ish) trail went from one side of the Auckland isthmus to the other, taking a traveler through many of the city’s famous parks. Getting a late start as we normally do, we left the hostel at a bright and early 1030am and not long thereafter I lost the map out of my back pocket and we were on our own. Not to fear, we had a general idea of where to go and a 1.3mil person city couldn’t be THAT big. After getting lost only a few times we connected back to the trail which led through historic districts, national monuments and even a sheep farm. Being good little tourists we took pictures of this for all you nice people to see.

A sheep farm in the middle of the downtown parks… this place is awesome!

An early morning by any standards, 530am wake up and we were out the door on day 4, headed to the bus stop and our wwoofing gig at the Packtrack farm. (Follow the blog for that update!)