21st July 2025

Wow, incredible – I just can’t believe I’m currently in New Zealand!  Country number 99, and about as far away on this planet that I can go in any direction away from the UK.  I’m sure if I was able to dig a hole in the ground as deep as it goes, I’d pop up on the other side somewhere near Sheffield or so!  This is the furthest away from home I’ve ever been, and ever will be, and I’m still trying to get my head around it!

But for all intents and purposes, with all its differences, New Zealand also feels oddly familiar.  The English-speaking people and the green rolling hills make it most seem like England to me, with the surrounding hilly horizon you can see from the city of Auckland.  The air feels much cleaner than back home though, and I noticed this straight away as I breathed in its freshness coming out of the airport.  The grass is also greener, and the sky a noticeably lighter shade of blue, while the open horizon all around seems to make the landscape much bigger.  And the people are so very very friendly, really polite and really helpful.  Perhaps it’s like an England of yester-year, when people didn’t become all uptight and full of themselves.  I was on more than one occasion pleasantly surprised when the person I was dealing with in a service situation responded to me politely, rather than indifferently or aggressively as can sadly be the case back home.  I’ve heard it said before that New Zealand is a land of English butlers and nannies, and I can certainly understand how this conclusion was drawn – there are a fair number of well-dressed older men around, and there seems to be a bit of a fashion down here for women to wear long skirts down towards their ankles.  I thought this was really cool.  These were my first impressions of this country, I was excited to explore more!

So on a Friday morning, I bade farewell to my good friend David.  He took a taxi from our hotel to Macau Airport from where he was flying back to northeast China where he works.  I lay in for an hour longer to get my own taxi back at 12pm, right in the middle of a downpour which drenched me just walking from the hotel to a taxi on the other side of the road, even after the receptionist had lent me an umbrella which I returned in the shop opposite!  I was heading back to Macau Port and my bus connection back to Hong Kong International Airport to continue my onward journey around the world.  While Macau indeed has its own airport, it is understandably very small given the nature of the territory, and flights only serve mainland China, presumably on smaller planes than are allowed at HKIA.

But it actually felt as if HKIA was also Macau’s own airport.  While I was impressed with my arrival bus journey, when the bus company collected my bag for me and sent it to the bus boarding area for me to collect and take with me on the bus, I was even more impressed with the return procedure.  Here you actually check in for your flight (that is, any international flight, any airline) at the small four-counter check-in area within the Port.  They even managed to check me in after I was told online I needed to show my onwards flight ticket following my time in NZ.  They then take your luggage, and it travels on your bus with you in a locked compartment, before being put directly onto your flight itself without you seeing any more of it until you arrive at your destination!  The bus takes you straight to HKIA’s departure lounge, although you still have to go through passport control there.  It really is like another airport for Macau, or rather the Macau Terminal of HKIA.  I am sure this wouldn’t have been the case pre-handover in the 1990s and earlier, and I have to admit, you’ve got to hand it to China for its sheer efficiency and organisation in managing these things.  I can’t imagine the amount of planning and legality-checking this must have involved.  This is something I’m particularly excited about seeing for my summer trip 2026 when I plan to do a trip through mainland China itself, but hopefully more on that next year!  Many times I have felt in Asia that this continent is booming and is the future, while we back in Europe age, decay and wither away with our archaic and overly-bureaucratised societies. 

Anyway, back to my trip.  I always like to arrive in airports ahead of time, and this time I had a whopping five hours to kill in HKIA – I wasn’t sure how long everything at the Macau Port would take, so gave myself plenty of time just in case!  My flight was also then delayed by an hour, due to the incoming aircraft being delayed due to the afore-mentioned heavy rain that the area was experiencing.  I was really quite fortunate still to avoid the tropical cyclone that was due to arrive the next day.

I sat and chatted at the departure gate with the friendliest group of flight attendants I’d ever met.  No wonder Air New Zealand often comes out tops in people’s favourite airlines, not necessarily due to the seats, food or anything else which is pretty much on a par with other airlines, but more to my mind the very genuine flight attendants and their service.  They all seemed to be enjoying every minute of their jobs throughout the flight, joking with each other, and chatting to the passengers.  Just gorgeous people.

Whilst New Zealand immigration and customs the next morning seemed even stricter than Australia’s, I was at least expecting it this time, so got no massive shocks, bag searches, or tellings off like I did last year arriving in Adelaide having committed a fair number of no-nos with them.  There was absolutely no food allowed through customs in NZ, not even the plane food that you might have stashed away if feeling a bit peckish later, which is what I often do but avoided this time.  I thus went easily through the “Nothing to Declare” lane, as opposed to the several different lanes I was made to go down back in Adelaide, while most of my fellow passengers in fact went through the “Goods to Declare” lane.  I wonder what their conversations at customs involved.  Sniffer dogs were then paraded around us as we were told to keep walking through and into the arrivals area, and having paid a hefty NZD$100 tourist conservation tax to acquire online my New Zealand Travel Authorisation (NZTA) a few weeks earlier, I walked out and into country number 99!

As mentioned, the first thing that hit me upon exiting the terminal building was the beautiful fresh air, and also the really light blue sky.  It does seem different down here.  As David said to me, the country vibrates differently, as does Australia, and I understand what he means.  The second thing that hit me, again as mentioned, was the friendliness and unhurried nature of the people.  Upon asking how to pay for a bus ticket to a lady nearby, she explained this first, and then later came up to me again to confirm that what she had said was correct after she had done a Google search for it.  Lovely!

I took the airport bus to nearby Puhinui Station on Auckland’s metro system, then a rail ride two stops south to the suburb of Manurewa.  I had arrived a bit too early for check-in, so enjoyed a lunch at the local KFC and sat outside in the warm sun, before the time came to check into my lovely and very peaceful self-contained apartment in this southern suburb.  The south apparently has a reputation for its lower living standards, but I really felt at peace there.  There is a significant Maori population, and I noted that it was around this area that the absolutely brutal and seriously hard-hitting film “Once Were Warriors” were set.  The people I passed on the street could not have been more different though, with everyone offering a “hello” or a “morning”, and being just super-friendly.  Every other house did seem to have a huge dog though, and I was grateful that they were all on leashes and not let loose.  I bought my self-catering supplies for my three days there at a nearby Woolworths store, and chilled for the rest of the day before calling it a night on my first day in this most magical-feeling country.  I was so excited to explore more the next day!

After a good night’s sleep, which was a pleasant surprise considering the jet-lag, I enjoyed a lovely day exploring Auckland’s city centre.  The weather was just stunning, and I was told the week before it had been dreadful, raining every day.  I must admit that pretty much all my time during my three weeks in the country, I was blessed with blue skies and sunny days, which I could tell considering the greenness and lushness of the land was a rarity.  I took the Metro train from the southern suburbs into the central station of Britomart, also known by its Māori name of Waitematā.  This was pretty much the central transport hub for the whole city, and surprisingly felt really chilled.  Despite being the country’s economic and commercial centre, and with a population approaching two million, Auckland has a very gentle vibe to it, sort of like Sydney on valium.  As with Australia’s main powerhouse, Auckland’s city centre is also centred around its harbour, with boat connections all around the Waitematā Harbour.  It’s just the ferries were fewer and further between, and there was no Opera House or Harbour Bridge in the distance!

After soaking in the harbour scene, I headed into the depths of the city itself, coming first across St Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral, where I received some much-needed grounding spiritually and bought myself a small finger-rosary to remind me of this centring that I sorely needed at the time.  While I have love for most types of Christianity, it is very much in the Catholic Church that I myself most find shelter and I felt blessed to be reminded of this on this day.  I had the feeling, which turned out very much to be correct, that as with Australia the previous year, and South Africa the year before that, this summer trip would also be an explosive one for me, teaching me many things, and continuing to help shape me as a person – a better one I hope.

I really enjoyed wandering Auckland’s skyscraper-filled streets for pretty much the rest of the day.  In between my urban landscape explorations, I took in a trip up to the top of the city’s iconic 328m Sky Tower, looking as my Lonely Planet quite accurately states like a giant hypodermic needle giving a high to the sky, as well as a visit to the Auckland Art Gallery.  The former afforded amazing 360° views around the city, over its downtown area and onto the suburbs, bays and islands beyond.  It really is a spectacular location for a city, enhanced even further by being centred around a narrow merely mile-wide isthmus separating Manukau Harbour to the west and Waitematā Harbour to the east, or on a much wider scale, the Tasman Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east.  While up there, there were also the occasional people doing the Sky Jump down the Tower, and the Sky Walk around it.  These were definitely not for me, I was sufficiently enthralled by standing on the Tower’s glass floor and looking directly down to the street level below.  The latter had some good pieces and introductions to the New Zealand landscape and Māori people and traditions.  I was particularly fascinated with the collection of 19^th century paintings of Māori people by Gottfried Lindauer (1839 – 1926), as well as those exploring face tattoos and the traditional and very painful-looking way these were created during pre-colonial times.

For my second full day in Auckland, I aimed to explore a bit more off the tourist track, though I have to be honest there wasn’t much else left to do in the city that was on the tourist track!  As a work colleague quite rightly told me, New Zealand is all about the big natural landscapes, not the cities.  I explored the northern suburbs and beaches on this day, by first taking a train back to Britomart, and then one of the many ferries leaving from the nearby Queen’s Wharf and over the water to a lovely little suburb called Devonport, on the opposite side of the water.

I was beginning to get a feeling for the typical New Zealander.  In Australia the year before, I felt you could just about strike up a conversation with anyone, and the Aussie personality was generally outgoing and often positively brash.  New Zealanders felt similarly friendly, especially in striking up conversations, yet with a more humble and genteel nature.  While waiting for the ferry I chatted to a nice, newly-retired Auckland couple, and then had two very deep encounters in Devonport itself.  The first one was a real healer for me, and I felt our conversation was a blessing and sorely needed, as I talked to a chap in the Salvation Army thrift shop in town.  We discussed comparisons and similarities between Christianity, other world religions, and also indigenous beliefs, particularly that of the Māori.  Comparative religion is a key interest of mine, and here I came across the Māori word for soul or spirit, “waurua”.  The second conversation seemed a more secular version of this, with a dog-walker on the way to nearby North Head who was a high-up corporate man working from home on this day, and walking his dog for lunch.  Twice in two days now I had heard something along the lines of, as you get older, you worry less about what people think of you and how they react – in essence, you couldn’t really give a sh!t about that.  I liked hearing this, particularly in a world where differing opinions seem to becoming less and less welcome or understood.  I love my travels, and particularly love the people I meet and the conversations I have with them.  I’m on a learning, spiritual journey when I travel, as much as a physical one.

Now back to the actual travels, lol!  I loved Devonport – a quaint little town with lots of nice shops, including a number of second-hand bookshops of the old-school variety.  The smell of them in particular reminded me of my childhood, hunting for the very collectible “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books in second-hand bookshops with my brother while on holiday in various places back in England.

I was heading up nearby North Head, one of around 50 volcanic cones in total throughout the city of Auckland, for awesome views over the East Coast Bays and Auckland skyline with its iconic Sky Tower I had ascended the day before.  There were also lots of really interesting batteries and military tunnels just waiting to be explored up there, from the headland’s early 20^th century days of being a point of defence for the city and country.  Little did I know that even this far away from Europe and Japan, WWII still made its ugly presence felt.

Before taking a bus further north up the coast, I stopped at a local chippy for some fish ‘n’ chips without the fish, but with plenty of salt and vinegar, and even wrapped up in an old newspaper page.  This very much added to my experiences of New Zealand being again an old-school version of England from 40 or so years ago, before it became all materialistic, self-centred and uppity.  I was heading to Takapuna Beach, Auckland’s answer apparently to Sydney’s Bondi Beach!  But upon closer inspection, it turned out to be, you guessed it, a much more quaint, civilised and slower-paced version of it to my mind. It was here where I encountered my first incredible tūī bird – what a bird! At first I thought there were about four different birds in the tree, but upon closer inspection there was just one large blue, green and brown bird with a small pom-pom-like piece of fluff on its throat. These remarkable birds can mimic any sound around them, mostly bird calls, but also even human-sounds such as car alarms and speech. I was absolutely fascinated listening to its repertoire, and it turned out to be just one of the many remarkable and very unique birds I encountered on my trip, endemic to New Zealand.

After a bus back to the city centre and a nice walk along the city’s upscale marina area, I took a train back to my accommodation for a large glass of wine and a microwave curry for tea – yay!

It was a wonderful first few days for me in country number 99.  I was still feeling the jetlag to be honest, but knew it wouldn’t be too long now.  The next day, the Road Trip part of my New Zealand journey would begin, and I’d be spending a week driving around the North Island before flying down South.  I was really excited to be exploring this lovely little country which I honestly knew very little about.  I was looking forward very much to finding out and learning more, which I’m sure I’ll be writing about further in my next.