So Long New Zealand & Thanks For All The Fish!

January 5, 2008

This is the last blogspot from our travels to Sydney and New Zealand, covering the last two days that we spent in Auckland prior to flying back home to wet, wet, wet San Francisco (and hopefully pow-pow-rific Tahoe!).

On the 3rd, we packed up our stuff, and said our goodbyes to Emily, their dog Gunther, and Rotorua, and then John, Will and I headed up to Auckland. We got to Auckland around 5 pm (about 3 hours drive from Rotorua), and checked into the Westin Auckland in the Viaduct Harbor.

Our dinner plan was to head to the Ponsonby district to Auckland's first fine-dining steak house in Auckland called Jervois Steak House and Saloon, created by famous kiwi chef Simon Gault. John had many great things to say about this place, and anyone who knows me at all knows that I like my meat, so it was all good.

If you haven't noticed, I hadn't been blogging food during this trip other than the side comment here or there, but I couldn't resist, I took a couple pictures of the food:

Steak tartare:
The server carving up our rib-eye to share:
Table of goodies, sides and great food:
The steak was fantastic, and I had the best horseradish I've ever had. Seriously.

Also, this drawing was on the wall upstairs and I had to have the picture:
From the Jervois Steak House, we did a little bar crawl down Ponsonby Street and checked out the cute neighborhood before stumbling back down the big hill and to our hotel on the Viaduct.

The next morning, we got up and headed out for breakfast (back on Ponsonby Road, we found a great little cafe. The place that John wanted to take us to was closed as most places are closed during the break between new year's and the 7th).

From breakfast, we drove over to famous One Tree Hill and Cornwall Park.
Incidentally, there's no longer "one tree" on the hill, it was removed long ago. Instead, there is the grave of Sir John Logan Campbell, who also requested the construction of an obelisk in honor of Maori people.
We climbed up to the obelisk and got some great views of the city:



The park itself is a large park that was apparently inspired by GG Park in SF. We made a makeshift disc golf course (apparently there is a disc golf course with objects as targets instead of real baskets, but we couldn't figure it all out, so we made some holes ourselves) and played some frolf.
From there, we saw that there was a lawn bowling club and checked it out. The Carlton Cornwall Park Bowling Club was very welcoming, and lent us some bowls to have a go:

We had decided to play a game to 5 points. I was down early, with only 2 points to John and Will's 4 points each. But I rallied, won a game with 1 point to have three points in total, and in our final game, I managed to get three bowls closest to the jack and took three points to win the game (the three closest are mine):
From Cornwall Park, John took us over to Mission Bay for a late lunch of mussels at one of his favorite places, De Fontein Belgian Beer & Cafe.

I had a pretty interesting raspberry belgian beer:
The mussels were amazing and huge! The portions were ridiculous, they also came with a huge bowl of frites. I chose the mussels in garlic, celery and onion, which were nice and simple.
Alas, I couldn't finish my mussels or my frites, it was too much food. Next time, I recommend sharing.
And alas, John had to take off and head down to Tauranga, so we said our goodbyes.

Our flight was the next morning, so we were pretty mellow. I had little energy to do much else, considering how much we had fit into our trip. Will's favorite thing that we did on the trip by far was the fishing trip and wants to make an annual trip to go fishing. My favorite might have been the flight to Milford Sound, but there were so many great things, so it's not easy to choose.

Thanks so much to John and Emily for helping us have the most amazing time while we were in NZ. Thanks also to Alex & Tolcher, Stephen, John & Melinda, and Dave & Drea for hanging out with us and showing us some great sights as well.