jwg

Now we are in Auckland. We are staying in a nice B&B in the outskirts of the city that is just off a lively street with lots of cafes, restaurants, and other stores.The B&B is called The Great Ponsonby; I recommend it - the only drawback is that wireless doesn't work in our room which is in a separate building (its a really nice room) - much of the construction is corrugated steel so I am sitting in the dining room at the moment. Downtown is about a half hour walk away. Auckland is situated in narrow portion of the North Island with a huge working harbors on one side and a wilder seacoast on the other side. It has many tall buildings downtown - I'm glad we elected to not stay in one of the huge hotels down there. We did go to the Sky Tower to the ~200 meter observation platform for a fantastic view of the city and its surroundings. In keeping with the bungy jumping / sky diving theme one of the things you can do is to jump off the side of the tower connected to a cable. It takes about 15 seconds to reach the bottom. I can't imagine even considering doing something so crazy but we did see some people doing it.

Today we drove to the Muriwai Gannet colony (we'd skipped going to one in Napier). This was easy to get to and there were lots of Gannets easily visible including some young ones who couldn't fly but were practicing flapping their wings.