I was impressed with United Airlines ... fairly nice staff, service, and amenities. We actually ate 3 times during our 13-hour jump from SFO to AKL: dinner, snack, and breakfast. We flew on a fairly new Boeing 777. We watched a few movies each, and slept/napped enough to give us a decent day's energy once we arrived.
Customs and immigration in Auckland were inefficient like SFO. It took us over 90 minutes to get through. They are very concerned about contamination of their environment here and they even took the time to wash the soles of Kate's boots.
Our prepaid/prebooked ride was waiting for us and zipped us to our hotel in just over 30 minutes. Our driver was from Botswana, having lived in New Zealand for 20 years now.
The hotel is decent value. It is very central. We got a suite on the top floor, and it has lots of room. We left our bags here 10-2, then checked in proper at 2PM. During those 4 hours, we had lunch at Empire Tavern, wandered the CBD waterfront, took the 12-minute ferry to Devonport, hiked up to Mt. Victoria (picture below was toward Auckland from Mt. Victoria), stopped at the ferry for a tea/hot chocolate at Devon on the Wharf, boated back, and wandered past the Stray Travel office on our way back to the hotel.
I got some good GoPro video of our walks today. I hope to post it on YouTube before we leave NZ, but there's a lot more coming.
Back at the hotel, we sorted out our stuff ... finding all the stuff we though we forgot/lost ... and Kate did some grocery shopping while I blogged. It'll be an early night to make up for time differences and broken sleep on the flight, and to make it easier to get up before 6AM to join our tour.
I'm sorry the tracks aren't really working so far on greenalp.com ... batteries weren't really charged, etc. So here is a link to the tracks I collected using the GPSmap 62S. I turned it on during our drive from the airport, and kept it on until we got to the hotel this afternoon.
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