Arrival in Auckland

We arrived in Auckland on Friday morning after a twelve hour flight from Los Angeles.  We checked in at Ponsonby Backpackers (hostel) for two nights, and immediately started walking around the city.  We picked up lunch at a New World supermarket and ate in Victoria Park, watching kids of all ages with their skateboards and scooters at the skateboard park.

We continued down to the marinas, warehouses and restaurants along the harbor.  A crowd was gathering on one of the wharves - we later found out this was a large number of Kiwi folks turning out to greet the New Zealand sailing crew returning from the America's Cup sailing races in California.

We took a bus to the Auckland Domain, a large park area that holds the Auckland Museum as well as the Winter Gardens, two old enclosed garden greenhouse/domes, and the Fernz Fernery, a wonderful covered area with a large sunken garden consisting entirely of ferns and related plants.

On Saturday we went on a boat trip to Tiritiri Matangi island, an island in the bay off of Auckland that has been cleared of mammals (e.g. rats, possums, weasels, stoats) and repopulated with native New Zealand bird species.  Our volunteer guide Jenny was very knowledgeable regarding both plants and birds, and we saw about fifteen species of native birds, including a few we hadn't seen our last trip to New Zealand.  The photos show some of these - a red-headed green parakeet, two variable oystercatchers, a saddleback (like a crow with a brown saddle), a stitchbird (black, white and yellow), and a tui (a large dark bird with a few white throat feathers, and a call that usually sounds like R2D2 of Star Wars fame.)




There were a lot more things to do around Auckland, but on Sunday we needed to move on, and went back out to the airport for a short flight down to Wellington.