After landing at Auckland international on the 30 Dec 2015, we immediately got some weird looks from people while collecting our luggage, hauling round a bike box and panniers trying to liase with bus drivers to get us into Auckland city centre with to where we had booked accommodation for the first few nights. He could only do us so good and we got dropped about 2 blocks out from the Attic backpackers hostel, which wasn't ideal, with 2 bike boxes and 4 loose panniers between the two of us. People offered to help us as we comically tried negotiating the main Street with a map and our luggage, tripping over each others feet every few steps.
The hostel itself was nice, we dumped our luggage in a room and tried to sleep off our jetlag for this first night. Once awake and feeling fresh we tried the tourist thing, a bit of sightseeing and to stretch are legs out from the flight still. Alice found a walking route around town which checked off many of the sightseeing bits so we cracked on with that for the majority of the day. When we returned we had 4 new room buddies, some large german people who stank the room out, slept all day and scoffed dunkin' donuts.
New years eve came along and we went on a bar crawl organised by the hostel, wasnt bad for $20 each but was a bit busy. It wasn't long before we left the large crawl to go to a restaurant to sober up and eat garlic bread. We then managed to catch the fireworks off the skytower not that either of us can remember them too well.
New years day was spent recovering and preparing, purchasing the last supplies we needed for the trip ahead and catch up on sleep. An early night then we would be up at 6 ready and raring to go.
