Days 317-319: Auckland

I had an early morning flight out of Sydney, so I got to New Zealand with still quite a bit of time left in the day. My hostel wasn't as central as a lot of them have been, but despite being by far the largest city in New Zealand it's still pretty small by international standards, and walking around is pretty convenient. There really wasn't all that much I wanted to do in Auckland. It's just another city, and I'll be in it again to flight out anyway, so I spent my days there focused more on planning out other upcoming things. I bought a bus pass with Naked Bus, which is one of the discount coach bus lines in New Zealand. New Zealand has really nice intercity bus systems, and the bus pass I got gives me 17 rides from anywhere to anywhere in New Zealand (excluding crossing between islands as part of a trip) for about $180 CDN. I very much doubt I'll be able to use all 17 trips, but I'll definitely be using enough to make the pass worthwhile. I also bought a cheap New Zealand pay-as-you-go cell phone since it makes the bus stuff much, much easier, and it will help with some of the national park bookings I need to do.

I did manage to see a fair bit of Auckland just walking around when the weather was nice. It's art gallery, while not as large and impressive as the ones in Melbourne and Sydney still had a nice collection. The museum was pretty far away from the city center, and while I vaguely tried to find it once it apparently cost quite a bit to get in, and I wasn't interested enough to really pursue it when I couldn't find it easily. Auckland also has one of those sky tower things vaguely like the CN Tower that pretty much every country seems to have now.