Our initial journey to New Zealand started in Nottingham, UK on March 6th and ended (temporarily) in Paihia on March 18th. In between these dates was a three night stopover in Hong Kong and a week in Auckland to find our feet.
We organised the whole thing through Bunac, an organisation offering a range of working holidays and gap year type adventures. This meant we had the opportunity to meet and travel with others who were all looking for a similar type of experience. Although we were travelling as a couple, it was still nice to be in the same boat as so many others as we all faced the the slightly daunting prospect of a year in a brand new country.
So… the journey.
Hong Kong
After some emotional farewells back in Nottingham, the journey began as we headed down to London for the night before embarking on the first serious leg of our trip; a 12 hour flight to Hong Kong! And straight away boxes were ticked, as neither of us had been to Asia before.
Truthfully, this part of the trip was a bit of a jet-lagged blur, but it was definitely worth doing.
It’s a pretty surreal place as they seem to have crammed a high-rise building into every nook and cranny they could find. This is partly because it is one the world’s leading financial centres, but mainly it’s because they have crammed over 7 million people into such a tiny area. And get this for a crazy-as-hell statistic – there are 17,000 people per sqaure mile in Hong Kong. To put that into perspective, in New Zealand there are 42 people per square mile. Fucking mind-blowing!
To sum it up, at the risk of sounding like an ignorant westerner… you know when you drive through China Town? Hong Kong was totally that – times a million.
A very interesting place though and definitely worth a visit. You can see more of our Hong Kong photos here.
First Week in New Zealand!
After another 10 hours or so on a plane, we finally arrived in Auckland where we’d already booked 7 nights in a hostel to give us time to get our bearings and to sort our shit out.
Once in NZ, Bunac kind of hand things over to another organisation called IEP, who basically provide support for all travelers who are on one of their working holiday visas. They provided an orientation meeting which included information on travelling the country, getting jobs, setting up bank accounts and various other useful snippets of info. I’m sure we could have managed without them, but it was undeniably helpful to have this bit of extra guidance initially.
The Boring Stuff
Banking
The first important thing to do was to set up a bank account. We chose KiwiBank and I would 100% recommend them to anyone. It was ridiculously easy to get set up, they’re in every Post Shop (so they’re very accessible) and their online banking system is by far and away the best I’ve come across.
Phones
Another important thing to get sorted was mobile phones. Pay as you go SIM cards are obviously the way to go when you’re temporarily in another country and we found the perfect deal as far as I was concerned. You will not struggle to find places giving out SIM cards for free, but with these you only get the bare minimum. Vodafone offer a SIM card for an upfront cost of around $35 I think it was – and then every time you top up $20, you get unlimited texts and 250mb of data. AND, you can call a UK landline for up to an hour for only $2!!
Vodafone should totally pay me some commission for that sell!
Things to do in Auckland
With the boring stuff sorted, we could finally start seeing what Auckland has to offer. We probably covered every inch of Queen Street in the first couple of days and so decided we needed to broaden our horizons for the rest of the week!
If you’re with IEP, make sure you get on the free Auckland bus tour offered by the Stray Bus. You don’t get much for free these days but this was definitely an exception to that rule!
We were driven around Auckland by a very laid back driver-come-tour-guide, with many stops along the way. One of the group got to do the free-fall jump off the Sky Tower, we went for a free beer and ribs at a very nice pub in Ponsonby and then got to walk under Auckland’s Harbour Bridge to watch the people in the group who wanted to bungy jump off it!
During the rest of the week, we walked up Mount Eden for 360 views of the city, headed out to the beaches of Takapuna and Missions Bay and then spent the last night having posh food in the Orbit Revolving Restaurant at the top of the Sky Tower!
An epic first week. You can see more photos of our first week in Auckland here.
Onto Paihia
Paihia is about 3-4 hours north of Auckland and is a particularly stunning part of New Zealand’s North Island. And luckily for us, it’s also where Hannah’s Uncle lives, who very kindly offered to put us up for a few weeks whilst I finished some work I had on (I was actually half way through writing a book which has now been published!).
So, as we arrived in Paihia, the first part of our adventure was over. We stayed for around 6 weeks, with the Summer stubbornly holding out til just before we left, but that’s another post for another day.