Today, the sky was fairly black and it looked like it was going to rain any minute. The one thing we have learned traveling thus far is to not let weather get in the way of any of our activities. With that said, we decided to “tramp across New Zealand” on the famous Coast to Coast Walk. It is an extensive 16km walk (about 10 miles) that starts very close to our Pier and takes you through downtown, the sizeable Auckland University campus along with many picturesque parks and quaint neighborhoods. The walk eventually ends on the other coast of Auckland; and, one can rightfully claim that they have walked across New Zealand!
Auckland is quite hilly. (The downtown area actually looks like a combination of San Francisco and Seattle.) We not only bounded up to the top of Mount Eden, the highest point in Auckland, but also managed to climb up a number of other hills and mountains on our walk. In the middle of the city, we found sheep & cows grazing in Cornwall Park. It is still spring in New Zealand, so the sheep are not sheared yet. They looked quite hefty with all of that wool!
We thought that we would find a number of neighborhood restaurants for lunch. Unfortunately, the trail is focused on the numerous parks along the way. When we were starving, we finally found a small village with a number of Asian restaurants – we chose the Malaysian restaurant. It was fine but clearly not as cheap as we found in Asia. After completing our walk without a drop of rain, we then walked another mile+ to a train station to get back to our pier. Our total walk probably exceeded 20km – great exercise but we were happy to get back to our apartment, drink champagne and watch the sail boats and setting sun.