Monday the 13th of April we woke up fairly early. After I showered I was getting dressed and a lovely black and white kitty jumped in through my window announcing itself with a "purrroaw!" We drove to Raglan, which supposedly has some of the best surfing in NZ. It was a little overcast but the beaches were pretty spectacular looking. None of the waves were particularly impressive looking and although there were quite a lot of surfers I didn't really see too many doing anything except sitting in the water. Apparently the cool thing about Raglan is the way the waves break so neatly, but I don't know much about surfing so I just assumed the conditions for waves probably get better than they were on the day we saw them.
The town itself was a classic, nice beach town. We drove listening to the beach boys tape (so appropriate) that Kaylenes dad lent us and stopped at a cafe for some brunch and coffee.
Then we drove to Auckland. To get back to Auckland we had to backtrack to Hamilton again and in Hamilton we made a pitstop in The Warehouse to finally purchase a tape adaptor because we were so sick of the tapes we had. We got rather lost and confused trying to get out of Hamilton because they were setting up for some car race and a bunch of the roads had weird detours. Once we finally got on our way we hit some traffic outside of Auckland itself and were thanking our lucky stars that we could finally listen to an ipod instead of the same tapes.
After dropping the car off we caught a bus (a free bus!) and found our hostel, the YHA international youth hostel. We settled in and were all so exhausted that we sort of sat and chilled in our room for an hour before heading out to explore and find food. We walked down K Road, which is the main st with food and shopping aside from Queen St. We drank 3 dollar beers (summits, I believe) because of some Easter special at a Tranny bar (haha). We sat outside talking and Chris found a little zine that had all the up and coming entertainment events in Auckland. There was a small article about a Shakespeare preformance with Ethan Hawke and directed by Sam Mendes. It unfortunately had just ended so there was no way we'd be able to catch a showing. We were disappointed but miraculously not 5 minutes passed did I spot Ethan Hawke and Sam Mendes crossing the street right in front of the bar we were sitting at.
Later in the evening we ate Korean food, which was pretty delicious and cheap. It was Brian's first experience with Korean food and it was a positive one.
We then wandered around Auckland at night. Chris had spent a week in Auckland prior to coming to Wellington so he showed us around to some spots he liked, like the Museum and a park. The night ended with us stopping in an internet cafe and then going to bed.
Raglan beach
Chris walking around the beach
Surfers
Hamilton race track? Weird...
The only picture I got while we were in Auckland. This is in the YHA, showing how tired we were from traveling.
In the morning we had to check out by 10, so we packed all our bags early. Brian headed out while Chris and I showered because he needed to buy some books and a new camera because his was all messed up. Chris and I headed out soon after and went to the Warehouse to buy some last minute supplies for our trip and also to kill some time. We ended up eating at Nandos around 11 and called our families to let them know we were heading off that day to Samoa. Around 12:15 we met Brian at a bus stop and we caugh the airport bus around 12:30.
Checking in to our flight was sort of stressful. For some odd reason the Pacific Blue required us to have printed out documents of our tickets, which we did not have because we did not have printers. I had a mild panic attack. The woman kept telling us that our registration numbers weren't good enough, that we needed proof that we'd be returning from Samoa (even though we bought round trip tickets!). So we ran to find a printer anywhere in the airport, but there were none. Instead I wrote down every last detail (using a public computer) of our flight information for ALL our flights. Brian talked with the supervisor while I did this and she informed us that as long as we had a return ticket already purchased there should be no problem. SO, We returned to the line prepared to fight for our right to get our tickets. They started giving us a hard time again, which was so weird. We called over a supervisor and she took one look at our information and said, "Oh, they're returning, they're fine." I wanted to punch someone in the face. OF COURSE WE'RE RETURNING. WE BOUGHT RETURN TICKETS. But it turned out okay, so I couldn't complain.
We checked out bags and then headed into the terminal to wait for our flight. We had a lot of time to kill and oddly enough our plane wasn't assigned a terminal until about 15 minutes before boarding so we spent a lot of time just waiting to find out where to go.
TO BE CONTINUED!!! The next entry will finally be about SAMOA!
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