This morning the airplane landed around 6:30 am in Auckland, NZ. The views from my window seat on the descent were pretty spectacular with beautiful oceans, endlessly rolling hills, and little white specks that I would later learn are the innumerable sheep that permeate the entire country. Adam, the group leader, rented a van and a trailer, which we would use for transportation and storage throughout our entire time in NZ. We spend about 40 days in NZ and about 20 days in Australia.
The first thing we did was go to a Home Depot type of store and a grocery store to stock up on supplies and food. I guess it is not that surprising when I think about it, but I find NZ to be very similar to the US in many respects. It is very modern and clean, and I don't have to worry about the water. There just isn't that shock that I felt once I arrived in Bangkok last September. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
After shopping we went to a public park called One Tree Hill, which is a hill with a big tower on the top that used to have a tree to commemorate some event that I don't remember. As you can see in the following picture, it is quite beautiful.
From the hill you could see some brilliant views of Auckland and the ocean. At the bottom of the hill there were a bunch of rocks that people have used to leave messages readable from the will. Since there are 4 other Pacific Challenge groups following our trails in the next couple weeks, we wrote the message "No tree hill. PCUE" (PCUE means Pacific Challenge Ultimate Expedition). After One Tree Hill, we drove to a beach and had made some lunch. This trip is a bit different from the last trip in that the group cooks all breakfasts and almost all dinners rather than going to restaurants all the time. Thus, I'm finally going to have to learn how to do some real cooking. Probably a good thing.
Auckland is an incredibly beautiful city. I think it might be the largest city in NZ and has a population of 1 million (NZ only has a population of 4 million overall). Not only is it very green, there are tons of brilliantly colored flowers all over the place. It is also very hilly and reminded my of where my Uncle Ron lives in Monterey, CA. After the beach, we drove a couple of hours to a town called Waitomo. I just listened to podcasts on my iPod while I stared at the beautiful NZ scenery.
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