With most cities, when you reach the city’s centre you get overwhelmed with the number of people there are, and the rather hectic atmosphere. However, Auckland was somewhat different. It felt like we were in a large village rather than a large city.

We started the tour of New Zealand by meeting with Bush and Beach Tours for an afternoon guided walk into Auckland’s spectacular Waitakere Ranges. This tour was a fabulous introduction to New Zealand nature with rugged coastline, magnificent waterfalls and wild black sand beaches combined with native rainforest and natural birdlife. The views were simply breath-taking. Our last stop on that tour was a visit to Piha Beach. Piha Beach was unusual – the sand was actually magnetic; placing a magnet close to the sand, you could actually see it being attracted to the magnet. Within seconds, the magnet was covered in sand. I don’t think this is common, but if it is, then it’s news to me!

We also visited Waiheke Island while staying in Auckland, but I will talk about that in another post.

We ended our stay in Auckland by going on a morning Dolphin Cruise. The cruise took us to the sparkling water of the Hauraki Gulf, surrounded by a myriad of South Pacific Islands. However, we were quite disappointed with this as we did not see that many dolphins and were on the boat probably 3 hours. We did get to see quite a lot of dolphins in the space of about 20 minutes, but the rest of the time consisted of waiting to see more. It was quite funny really, we didn’t see anything for the first perhaps 90 minutes of the trip, so once it was announced that dolphins were in sight, absolutely everyone sprung into life and ran to the front of the boat. Ah well. It was a nice trip nevertheless.

We ended our stay in Auckland by going up the Sky Tower which offered fabulous views over the Hauraki Gulf and downtown Auckland as well as doing some shopping. I’m souvenir crazy, so have to shop for souvenirs everywhere we go!

Tags: New Zealand

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