23-25/8 Claire – Auckland

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Originally uploaded by blenkers

So this is quite exciting, the North Island. We haven’t spent any time here as we only had 2 and a half weeks in NZ so without risking spending every waking moment in the car we made a conscious decision to keep to a small schedule. We did however make some last min plans to bring forward our flight to Auckland (you can fly into Christchurch but to fly out to the Cook Islands you need to fly from Auckland creating a need for an internal flight from south to north islands) by a couple of days. The reason for this is that Ian’s “mate Andy from Hong Kong” now lives in Auckland and after losing touch after Uni they haven’t seen each other in about 15years. To be honest I thought “Andy from Hong Kong” was a made friend so thought it would be good to see if he was indeed real.

Andy who is in fact Andrew (apparently never used the name Andy other than when the guys in Uni started using this) and his wife Chris met us at the airport and we had two days of catching up planned with them. The next couple of days have been a whirlwind tour of Auckland with lots of fantastic food thrown in.

Now when Ian got excited about Frisbee golf, he’s told EVERYONE about it. Chris had to work today so Andrew drove us to a beautiful beach near Auckland called Puhe. It’s volcanic so black sand and as the boys took the Frisbees a made up course was created. Thankfully I had my camera so could leave them to it. Part of that however might have been that I didn’t want my double par Frisbee shot skills being aired in a public arena however.