Day 17 - Auckland

We flew from Queenstown up to Auckland this morning in preparation for our flight from Auckland to Tahiti the next day.  We figured it would be cool to check out Auckland for the day before we flew out.  While Auckland seems like a cool city to live in, there isn't much for tourists to check out.   But we made the best of it.

After checking into the Westin right on the water downtown, we decided to walk over to the museum of Auckland to check out some history about the Maori people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māori_people), the original inhabitants of New Zealand.  It took us about 1 hour to walk over to the museum as we had to walk through downtown (nothing special) and then several parks.  Here is the view of the skytower from the first park we walked through.

Right after that park, we walked past the Business School for the University of Auckland.  It was funny to see so many students studying for exams today, which was Sunday.  Apparently we were there right in the heart of their exam period.

We finally got to the museum, which was really cool.  It was a multi-purpose museum.  It had exhibits on volcanos (there are over 50 extinct volcanos in the Auckland area), NZ's participation in WW1 and WW2 and of course, the Maori people.

Afterwards, we walked back to downtown and watched several people jump off the SkyTower via the SkyJump.  It's kind of like a bungy jump, except that you don't bounce-up.  You fall all the way down the tower until just before ground, when a break on the cord slows you down and stops you at ground level!  Anyway, it's insane!  Afterwards, we grabbed some dinner and called it a night.