Kia Ora New Zealand!
We’ve been silent for almost a week now and reason being, most accommodations in NZ do not offer free available Wifi; it cost at least NZ$5/hour for 500MB. Imagine paying and still be limited by the amount of data that you can download.
We stayed at my aunt’s place for the first 3 nights in Auckland. She and her family live at a farm, about 30km south of Auckland. She lent us a car so we could move about but the weather wasn’t too kind to us; it was raining over the 2 full days so we hardly saw anything – we went to Mt. Eden and One Tree Hill for views of the city but they weren’t much since the rain brought the fog.
Auckland for us has been mostly catching up sessions. We managed to meet Teemu and his girlfriend for lunch before their departure day. After lunch, we visited the waterfront and fish market after . It was a nice walk although windy. Later on the same day, we went over to Lee Lee & Ray’s place for dinner. They made us curry laksa, which was awesome for me since I haven’t had Malaysian food for 4 months now :)
NZ has more sheep than people so we wake up every morning and see sheep behind my aunt’s yard :) After Auckland, we took the train down to Wellington, which passed by a scenic route. Then we flew to Christchurch for our south island road trip. All good, except that Internet is limited.
lucky you to have an aunt in NZ, good to have a friend in strange or new places.
i’ve precious few relatives overseas. what’s wrong with these people? why can’t more of them migrate so i can visit them? think it’s more your generation who are more likely to move abroad. in the 1980s and 90s, most western countries tightened up on migration.
i was just thinking of NZ today. this is a good time to be there. recall checking it’s summer that’s cool there, any other time’s cold. when’s my turn to be there? sometime soon i hope. you made the right decision to travel now.
a bit strange that you e-mailed from NZ yesterday, you seemed somewhere near, like in starbiz. i’m from the mechanical age, the wonder of the net amazes me now and then.
up till now, where would you like to stay on for a longer time, like a month or so, somewhere in south or north america?
NZ has been a string of catching up with people ;) believe or not, I had dinner with Susan while in Kaikoura :) We happened to be in the same town to watch whales, hehe …
Definitely recommends NZ especially the south islands for a road trip. The landscape is quite amazing. We had some good sunny days (it happened to be their coldest summer in 20 years or so …) and got to capture those moments. Internet sucked in NZ, btw, cos’ they dun have copper lines hence I haven’t been able to update the blog much.
If I had more money, I’d definitely stay longer in Latin America. Some of my best memories are from this region ie. Guatemala, Rio de Janeiro and Chile. Machu Picchu was great to visit so I can finally strike it off my list but Peru didn’t interest me all that much.
i hope to hit the road next year.
it would have to be late next year, after my son leaves for the US.