Car troubles

Auckland city
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Leaving Taupo we drove via Hamilton, which incidently has a very good museum of art history and selection of cafes onto Auckland.  We mistakingly booked into a very cheap hostel with a low rating in the BBH book under the impression that 2 TV rooms and recent renovations wouldn't make it that bad, but we were very, very wrong!  The place was actually up for sale, our room was such a bright orange it hurt your eyes, the bathroom was under a centimetre of water and the loo doors didn't offer privacy.  The curtain was so sticky it stayed screwed up even after we unknotted it and it had a rather unpleasant smell.  It however served as a place to leave our car whilst we went round the hostels both putting up posters for our car and looking for somewhere better to stay.  We weren't going to eat in that hostel and were very pleased to find a pub selling a large range of Belgium beers, (our favourite) so we settled down to some good Belgium stew, mussels and chips washed down with some expensive but worth it beer!  The next day we found a much better hostel.

Waiheke island vineyard
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Over Easter Auckland was pretty closed up which meant going to supermarkets to cook your own dinner was difficult, one factor which annoyingly ate into our budget.  Our next few days were spent in car markets trying to sell the car and visiting sights around Auckland, we also met up with Roz and Pete, friends of Nick's from back home a couple of times and checked out the minus 5 ice bar where everything including the glasses were made of ice, but we all refused to pay the extortionate entry price.  By Easter monday we had a bit of interest in the car and accepted an offer but had to wait for their mechanical inspection.  Unfortunately unknown to us the car had a few problems, the main one being that the engine was misfiring which if it affected the electrics could be very expensive to fix, needless to say the girls did not want to buy the car anymore and realistically we decided that it wasn't really going to sell on the backpackers market especcially with such a big engine that eats up petrol.  We had arranged to sell the car for parts but managed to sell the car to a guy who was interested from the internet for $150, he knew the problems and risks and was prepared to do it up himself.     To cheer ourselves up about the car we went to the vibra-train in Auckland and pretended we had never heard of it before and thus got another free workout, then opened a bottle of our favourite wine in the evening with some fresh fish we cooked and found free fresh muffins in the free food.  Its always the little things that cheer us up, and it usually involves food.  Tip a chocolate brownie will bring a smile to Nick's face, so we made a few trips to the Pandoro bakery at the end of the road, our favourite bakery in New Zealand.

Waiheke island
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Once the car was sold it was actually a relief even though we had wanted more money for it, and being too lazy to visit elsewhere in New Zealand we used our last days to visit the islands in Auckland harbour.  Rangitoto island was particularly interesting, it erupted only 600 years ago, so it was interesting to see the regrowth of vegetation compared to Hawaii and the lava rock.  We went to a free Ceroc lesson together (Ceroc is French Jive) but it was rather packed to have a good boggie.  We also visited Waiheke island and walked to a very picturesque, tasty but pricy winery for our last wine tasting for a while, and managed to get ourselves a free pub meal on the harbour on our return.  We finished our time in Auckland with a good film Kinky Boots,  "2 and a half feet of tubular sex" and a trip to the excellent chocolate boutique cafe in Parnell, where we were staying, this place had hundreds of variations on the humble hot chocolate all very delicious, try it if you ever go to Auckland.