This weekend James and I took a KiwiRail Scenic trip on the Northern Explorer.
We’ve both taken the Costal Pacific train on the South Island, and have wanted to see the North Island by train for a while, so we thought that we’d just go. As we’ve just got married, we treated it like a pre-honeymoon honeymoon!
As Covid is still lingering, we had to wear masks for the entire train journey. The first ten minutes were a bit strange, but I soon got used to the feeling and got on with it…we did have over 11 hours of it after all! We were allowed to remove them to eat and drink. I think there were some people who were just eating and drinking to take off their masks. Ha!
The train runs between Wellington and Auckland, winding through the countryside for what feels like forever. The scenery is just amazing, however, I didn’t manage to get any photos because I was too busy actually looking at the scenery. But I guess that’s a good thing 🙂
When we arrived in Auckland, we headed straight for dinner at Tanpopo, a ramen restaurant that one of my friends recommended last time we were here. It’s the type of place where you get huge bowls of food for a very reasonable price. We quickly went to check into our apartment, and after a little bit of searching, found it.
We had looked into staying in a hotel, but in Auckland all of the hotels are quite expensive, so instead found an apartment to rent in the same building as one of the hotels that we had looked at! Here are a few photos:
– The first photo is a panorama from our balcony.
– The other two are views around the area of the apartment.
In the morning, we travelled to Devonport and had a sunny walk along the waterfront before stopping in for brunch at a cute little café a short way up the main street. After brunch we noticed the America’s Cup boats training in the bay, and ran to watch them. They were quite far away though, so we didn’t get a very good view!
We stood watching the bay for a while and then got the boat back to the main Auckland area. I took some great photos on my phone!
Next on the list was Ponsonby, we went to visit the War Memorial Museum. I have been to it before, but never inside! We spent a few hours inside, starting at the top and making our way down. We began with the New Zealand history exhibits. I learnt a lot about the history of New Zealand actually. It was a very interesting floor, as the rest of the floor is centered around various other wars, so there was a lot of information on points of view that I had never seen before. I mean every museum dedicated to war that I have been to really has been from a European – mostly English – viewpoint. So to read about the Boer War from a New Zealand perspective was quite interesting.
After the museum, we walked back in to the city through an absolutely delightful set of botanical garden greenhouses.
Our final trip on the Sunday was to the shopping mall to pass time. We chose one of the fairly average Westfield malls, largely due to my incompetence, but it was a reasonable way to pass the time before our flight home, and I did end up with a new bra…so I guess you could say it was a success. Ha!
We had the bumpiest re-entry to Wellington that i’ve had in a while.
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