New Zealand 3: Auckland and Hamilton

On Tuesday, February 13, 2018, we flew from Fiji to New Zealand, arriving in Auckland at about 2pm.

New Zealand has two main islands, usually called the "North Island" and the "South Island". This relief map also includes the Maori word for New Zealand (Aotearoa) and for the individual islands.

The Maori are thought to have arrived in the land of the "long white cloud" around 1350 A.D., and Europeans first charted it in 1642 but didn't land there until 1769. So the Maori are one of the younger native civilizations.

Hobbits first settled in New Zealand until 1999 (at least, that's when The Lord of the Rings was first filmed). Here's a Middle Earth statue at the airport.

We took a shuttle to Go Car Rentals, and Jon kept an eye on the luggage while Rob and I arranged to "hire" the van.

I had been a little freaked out about whether our luggage would all fit in the vans, but since everyone did one small bag (plus backpacks), it was no problem.

Having become a seasoned veteran of left-side driving, Rob once again drove most of the way (though Linette took a turn once). This time, our van was a lot nicer than the previous one. It was a Toyota Estima, which is their name for the Toyota Previa (which is no longer sold in the U.S. because Siennas are built there instead).

Jon & Shauna knew a couple who were senior missionaries in Auckland, and we had arranged to do dinner with them. They gave us a couple of suggestions of things to see before dinner, and one that they mentioned was "One Tree Hill" (Maungakiekie).

I had never heard of that before, but Rob got surprisingly excited about it, so off we went to see it.

It was amazingly green there. And in all of New Zealand, actually.

Here's Rob falling off a cliff.

It's even better to watch him pose for the picture in this video.

The little white dots down there are sheep.

And people had spelled things with the rocks in the fields below (like, "China.")



After we had looked around and took a peek at the monument, Rob told us why the place was meaningful to him.

Rob is pretty into music, and apparently the Irish rock band "U2" had done a concert in New Zealand, and had hired a local Maori fellow to help with things. The guy had taken them to see One Tree Hill, and they enjoyed him so much that they hired him to join them on tour and help out.

Some time later, the young man was killed in an accident while running an errand for them in England. The lead of U2 wrote a song in honor of him, called "One Tree Hill," which they performed just the once to record it.

So Rob read the words to us, and even teared up a little, and we had a nice little moment up there, which was an unexpected cool experience.

Here is a video of U2's song, if you're curious and like mellow rock music.

Our next stop was Mount Eden (Maungawhau). It is a volcanic cone that was pretty impressive. It also has a similarly beautiful view from the top.

While up there, Shauna talked to a Chinese girl, and told her and her mother about how her daughter Shanelle was in Chinese immersion at school.

With that, we drove to meet Jon & Shauna's senior missionary couple friends (and another couple) for dinner. Since we had already had Indian, Turkish and Korean food, it was time for Italian.

Auckland has the "Sky Tower", which is a little like the Space Needle of Seattle.



 

After dinner we drove from Auckland to Hamilton, which was about two hours away. We were running a bit late, so I called the hotel to see if it would be ok to check in a little later than we were supposed to. The guy was amazingly nice and said they'd wait for us. When we got there, he was charming, had a great beard, and handed us each a little bottle of milk as we each checked in.

"Why the milk?" I asked.

"Welllll, you know... people...like...milk..." he said. Well, I couldn't argue with that.

Wednesday morning we got up and headed to the Hamilton New Zealand Temple. (Here's Jon modeling his milk for us).

The temple was built in 1958, so it was one of the earlier ones. It was Valentine's Day, so we did sealings, along with a French couple from New Caledonia. I had never heard of that before, but apparently it's west of Fiji, and very pretty.

On our way out of the temple, Shauna saw a lady and said, "Hey! I know you! I took pictures at your son's wedding last year in Utah!"

It took a moment for this to register with the lady, but when she realized how amazing that was, she got really excited, and said, "Well, it was meant to be!"

We also saw this naughty rabbit eating flowers.

It had been raining for a week prior to this, but we ended up having a pleasant morning for our trip to the temple.

After much serious deliberation over restaurant options on "Yelp!", we accidentally found Kebabelicious, which had extremely good Turkish food.

Then we walked over to the free Maori "Waikato Museum".

There were quite a few interesting art displays there.

Here is a traditional Maori war canoe. There was also a big display about New Zealand's involvement in World War I, and a tribute to the 10,000 horses that were sent into the war from New Zealand, only 4 of which returned.

When we came back outside, it was pouring rain, so we had to run for it, since we had left our umbrellas in the car.

We took refuge under an overhang near an ice cream shop.

I had heard that New Zealand had "the best ice cream in the world", and I was personally committed to testing that hypothesis through extensive empirical investigation.

Here's a little video of the rain as we drove through one of the green "tree tunnels" on the way from Hamilton to Rotorua, which was about an hour away.

We had rented a house via AirBnB that was right between the lakes of Rotorua and Rotoiti. There was also a small lake on the driveway due to the downpour, so we had to form a chain and pass the luggage across.

The owner of the house was very kind and showed us how everything worked. He showed us how to turn on the TV, and it just happened to be on the channel with the Winter Olympics on, which were going on in Pyeongchang, Korea. We had been disappointed to be missing the Olympics, and since it was pouring rain outside, we decided to relax (perhaps for the first time on our trip) and sit back and watch the Olympics for a while.

As luck would have it, it happened to be the men's half-pipe finals, and we got to watch as Shaun White came from behind in the very last run and put on a spectacular performance and won the gold medal. It was an amazing Olympic moment.

The rental house had a deck out back with an amazing view of Lake Rotoiti. I ate outside every chance I got.

Jon Hunt's best friend from high school happened to be in New Zealand the same week as us, and happened to be staying about 5 minutes away, so they dropped by for a visit.

They were planning to do a barbeque that night anyway, so they ended up bringing their food over to our place and we grilled on the back deck and had a wonderful dinner, and finished up with a couple rounds of the game "Code Words."

That night after the sun set, we looked up at the stars and they were really bright, since we were so far from city lights. The Big Dipper was not visible from where we were (at least not with the trees around), but I could see Orion quite clearly. It shouldn't have surprised me that he was upside-down, but it did!

And as we were looking at the stars, there was a rustling sound, and out of the bushes wandered a big hedgehog. Then he just sort of sauntered back into the bushes.

In the next episode, we hang out with dolphins and hobbits.