On Monday evening I left Heathrow for Auckland via Bangkok and Sydney. A couple of days later and I'm booked into Auckland Central Packpackers hostel in the very centre of the city.
The flights were okay and I managed to get a great seat by economy standards for the longest legs of the journey. I ended up getting a bulkhead seat with no-one in front of me, so I had a ton of legroom. I didn't get much sleep, but got enough to see me through.
The stop at Bangkok was about 3-4 hours long, but when we got to Sydney it was taken down to about 30 minutes because of a delay in docking the aircraft.
It turned out that when we got to Auckland that all of our baggage hadn't made the journey with us, so about 10 of us who had travelled from Heathrow had to wait an hour or so to collect our larger packs. I hung around with a couple of other backpackers and we went for a drink while we waited for the packs to come through. It was nice at least to have someone else in the same situation as yourself.
So I've booked into the ACB hostel and it's better than I expected. The dorm is just four beds and there's plenty of space and a more than adequete locker for my luggage.
I'm not sure what I'm doing tomorrow, probably have a look around the immediate area and make my way towards the tourist information centre. If the weather's nice I might even go and do a bit of photography.
