New Zealand / Sydney / Dubai 2015-2016

[wez130]

So, my partner and i went to New Zealand, where my partner is from for a holiday, and to get married.

Job done

Anyway, we've been back for 3 1/2 weeks now and i've only just got round to uploading some of my phone pics to flickr. Still got thousands of camera pics and gopro videos and timelapses to get through
I thought some would like to see some of our pics anyway.

We flew out of Manchester on 29th November 2015 with Emirates to Dubai, we had a 2 hour stop off followed by a 14 hour flight to Brisbane, then finally, a 2 hour stop and a 2 1/2 hour flight to Auckland. I was prescribed some Diazepam for the flight as i cannot sleep during travel, Diazepam did NOT work . I went 2 full days with ZERO sleep. Flights were turbulant all the way, i had been pretty anxious about flying as i hadn't flown since 1999. I actually enjoyed it, though 14 hours on a plane was just toooo long and boring, there were no decent movies on the AVOD system, but fortunately, there were no crying babies either .

The A380 is huge, we were sat in Row 48 or 47 in all our flights, i liked it there.

Somewhere over Iran / Persian gulf

Approaching dubai

Sunrise over Oz

Somewhere over australia...

We arrived in Auckland on 1st December around 3.30pm and were collected by my partners' parents and taken to their home in Whangaparaoa (North of Auckland), where we went straight to bed.

I really liked Whangaparaoa, lots of beaches.

And it's weird seeing xmas decorations when it's 25 degrees outside...

We spent the 1st week or so gtting things ready for the wedding and getting to know my future in-laws. They were fantastic.


Where we got married...

Our wedding cars... My wife was chauffered, i drove the M3

 

[wez130]

So, after the wedding, we hired a campervan to travel around North island.

We didn't have a strict plan for the trip, pretty much took it as it came. 1st night we drove from Auckland to Raglan

Timelapse of Raglan to New Plymouth

There was a nice open fish and chip restaurant here near the fishing port. It was a strange vibe here too, it was a quiet town, but where there was social life, it was busy, loud music etc.

Day 2, we drove from Raglan to New Plymouth Not too much to see here, except a pretty cool building - got more pics of this on my camera but not looked yet.

There was a pretty cool light festival too at Pukekura park. I wasn't fully prepared for it for photography tbh, it was our honeymoon and i doubt it would have been appreciated carrying tripods etc lol.

Day 3 + 4. We spent 2 nights in Wellington, it's a nice city, and was not windy, which for Wellington, is not normal It's a pretty compact city with lots of good bars and restaurants, i found a bar that was tucked away in a back alley which served some fabulous beer, and pretty decent food too. It was called 'Craft beer & kitchen'. Lots of good craft beers on tap, my favourite was an 8 wired brew called tropidelic. Sadly, i cannot find it anywhere in bottles, not even on 8 wired's own website .

Driving into wellington

The Beehive (Government building). Weather weren't great hence washed out pic

Wellington city from Te Papa museum.

There was some fabulous stuff in the museum, a lot of Maori artefacts, this was a Maerai, where Maori people would traditionally 'meet'. They are pretty much all like this all over NZ, we saw a few different ones. Very intricate details.

The front of a Maori boat

More Maori art

The detail on a restaurant we ate at. Osteria del Toro. It was really nice, the food and the decor.

Civic square

Day 5 + 6 - Lake Taupo

Not much on my phone from Taupo, we stayed at a 'top 10' holiday park here, this was the 3rd one we had stayed at, i think they are like our 'haven', but less chavvy, This one had matural mineral pools, they were naturally at about 48c degrees. and smelled of sulphur, as i guess you'd expect. We had a thunder storm here and some pretty heavy rain. We went to huka falls, there was a coach full of maoris here playing music and instruments on the bridge, but i left my gopro in the camper van and when i had got it, they were leaving. Damn! anyway, Huka falls is really nice, the water was so clear and the falls were so powerful.

Lake Taupo - You can see Mount Ruapehu, the tallest mountain in North island. See if you can work it out. (It looks like clouds )

Waikato river - the longest in North island, it seemed to be everywhere, everywhere i drove, i saw a sign for Waikato river!

We went to a thermal park called Craters of the moon, it was lots of thermal springs...

Day 7 - Rotorua

I think Rotorua was one of my favourite places in North island, although it stunk of sulphur. It's pretty much thermal spring central, the drive was pretty spectacular too. If it didn't smell so sulphiric, i could live there, it's pretty cheap too!

The McDonalds in Rotorua is certainly one of a kind, and worth a visit...

And there was a park with loads of thermal springs, this one looked pretty nice, the water was so clean too...

Day 8 - Tauranga & Papamoa beach

Not much to say about here, it was nice though, except, there was a shark in the sea, close to the shore. Never got a pic though.

Day 9 - Hahei, Cathedral cove and Hot water beach.

Well, this was an interesting place, Hot water beach was one of the places i was most looking forward to visiting. It did not disappoint, what a surreal experience, Natural hot water thermal springs at around 70c degrees, underneath the sand, and the sea! When the waves rolled out, you could see the spring bubbling away. You get there around 2 hours before or after high tide, dig yourself a big hole and bath in it. Cathedral cove was Idyllic, postcard perfect.

Our last night was near Auckland but it wasn't interesting so no images from there.

We visited almost everywhere we intended to, but missed out Napier, we'll go there next year. I would highly recommend hiring a camper van if you go here. It's such a camper van friendly place, there's lots of freedom camping places too, so you could effectively camp for free. We paid about $50 a night but stayed in mostly 'Top10 resorts'. we freedom camped one night at Taupo.

We paid $1888 for our camper hire for 10 nights, that included the 'almighty' insurance, so that we were covered for all eventualities, we also had a nice tomtom satnav included in our van. It was surprisingly comfy in the van too!

I set my gopro up to take a timelapse of most of the trip in 1 second intervals, a couple of times the battery went or the cable unplugged and stopped recording though. I'm in the process of sorting them out, i've done one part which is currently uploading to youtube, but tbh, it was a bit of a rush job and i'm taking my time thinking about how to do it better for the rest of it.

That's it for tonight, i'll continue tomorrow with the rest of NZ - i went right up to Cape Reinga too.

 

[wez130]

Auckland and Cape Reinga

Before we got married, we spent a couple of nights in Auckland city, it's a great city, really clean and with lots to do. Shopping is prety good too, my favourite shops we J B Hifi and Noel Leeming (Both electrical shops). The choice for mens fashion is pretty limited, there's Hallensteins which is a bit like Topman, an there's Jeans inc, which is pretty much...Jeans, there are a couple of other chains but i forgot their names. J B Hifi though, is like walking into a late '80's Japanese store, hand written price tags on everything! One thing i wanted to do, but didn't get to do for some reason or other, is go to the top of Skytower. Don't ask me why lol.

Anyway, we got the fery from gulf Harbour to Auckland, which took about 40 minutes, it was a somewhat overcast day, so didn't manage to get any nice images of Rangitoto or the Auckland skyline, there's always next year though.

Although there was a lot to see and take photographs of in Auckland, that wasn't my primary purpose i'm sad to say, so my limited photos are pretty much of sky tower. We walked to Mt Eden to take in the views...(Again, i probably have better pics of this on my camera).

This was taken from the harbour bridge on a diferent day but it's still relevent. This is why Auckland is called the city of sails. They have more boats per capita than anywhere else in the world.

I really should photoshop the cable out of this one...

Reflections...

Abstract...

The sun did eventually come out too...

One of the downsides to using a phone for photography, is noise...

Finally, one from Parnell

So, after our honeymoon camping trip, we went up north to the very top of NZ, Cape Reinga, it's about 120km from the nearest proper town, Kaitaia but still a lot of people around, i guess because it was the warmest day whilst we had been in NZ, people ventured out more. Still, it's a stunning place and worth the long drive out.

The meeting point, where the Tasman meets the Pacific.

So that's pretty much the best of what i managed on New Zealand on my phone. I have plenty more to work through on my camera yet, but iguess, the point of this point is to see how far phone camera photography is away from proper camera photography. For every day stuff, the quality is there, but for artistic stuff and full manual control and optical zoom, no, it's not there.

 

[wez130]

Part 2 - Sydney

So the next leg of our trip was New year in Sydney. We said our goodbyes to the in-laws, there were tears from my wife and her parents, i felt a bit sad to be leaving too, New Zealand is a fantastic country and we've already planned to return next January, we have to wait to book our flights though as we're going for 6 weeks again. Anyway, enough of that.

So, we left Auckland on Emirates A380 (A6-EEK), i stuck my noise cancelling headphones on pretty much straight away, put the fierce angel mix on the AVOD system (If you like hed kandi stuff- it's excellent), and settled into the flight. Approx 15 minutes after take off, the captain came ove rthe tannoy system with an announcement...

'Ladies and gentlemen, you may have just heard an unusual noise, we are having trouble retracting the landing gear so we're bringing it out again and retracting it again and hopefully this will sort the problem out.'

My fae = (How apt - the plane was A6-EEK

Anyway, i tried not to worry about it but i'd be lying if i said i didn't worry for the rest of the flight, it wasn't until we were making our final approach into Sydney, where my mind was put at rest, (see video to see why). We Approached Sydney from the south, and we were sat on the left of the plane so we got excellent views over Sydney.

Screen grab from the video

And the video...

Anyway, Sydney. It's a big city with its main focus on the harbour bridge and the opera house, Darling harbour was a good night out but apart from that, there wasn't much else i was interested in, we were only there for 3 nights anyway. We arrived on the evening of 30th december so stayed in the hotel that evening and had dinner there.

31st December, we got the underground train from Mascot (We stayed close to the hotel so we didn't have to lug our baggage around), We arrived at the harbour around 10am. We had already decided we'd be going for one of the free events for NYE and headed for Mrs McQuaries point. We got there, the queue was HUGE, even at 10.30AM. It took us 4 hours to get into the event so we were going nowhere once we were in! We didn't know what to expect either, what we got wasn't the best views but a great atmosphere. We sat and got drunk all day.

Why can't our trains be like this, they are in Spain and France too.

Sydney skytower - Not quite as tall as Aucklands, but the viewing platform is higher than Aucklands sky tower.

Excuse the body :S (it was hot)

CBD from Mrs McQuaries point

The next day we weren't too hungover so we walked around the CBD, never took many photos though, only got this from Queen Victoria buildings.

We also visited Darling Harbour. It was pretty good there, lots of restaurants and bars.

Just a few more from a walk around the bridge and opera house...

The Grand Hyatt hotel

Overall, as nice as Sydney is, i did everything i felt i wanted to do there and i wouldn't rush back, if i did stop there on a connecting flight again, i may stop a couple of nights maybe.

Next up - Dubai.

 

[wez130]

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