Auckland, New Zealand – Sightseeing and Our Itinerary

Our Auckland trip with attractions, scenic views, and local food highlights. This was a lovely sightseeing adventure in New Zealand.

This trip was an extraordinarily long vacation covering 10 different countries: New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. We were gone for approximately 14 weeks.

Auckland, New Zealand – Sightseeing and Our Itinerary

Usually, I write up my experiences when I get home. This time, I wrote up my experiences daily. In the end, I filled two notebooks! I hope you enjoy reminiscing with me about our travels.

No trip goes 100% smoothly. But, it is always concerning when it starts off with a canceled flight.

I like to fly as directly to a destination as possible. Less chance of missing flights and missing luggage. Hubby knows this about me, so he booked us a flight from Pensacola to Houston, we would stay overnight, and take a flight from Houston to Auckland the next day.

Six days before our scheduled flight, he got an email from United; that direct flight from Houston to Auckland was canceled, they were doing maintenance on the plane.

Now, on the one hand I don’t want to fly on an unstable plane. On the other hand #@!%$.

We were given a choice of Houston to LAX, LAX to Auckland or Houston to San Francisco, San Francisco to Auckland. The LAX choice was wonderful- a 3.5 layover giving time for delays but not too long a layover in the airport.

Welp, a lot of others must have thought the same because even with a phone call to United it was impossible to get a flight through LAX. (It was also the time of the California wildfires, so I wonder if there were canceled flights?)

We ended up with an 8 hour layover in San Francisco, but no other delays or problems.

When we landed in Auckland we checked into our hotel. Hubby had booked the hotel visit to begin the day before so when we arrived at 9am we would have somewhere to go. We accidently did that in Rome years ago, and I highly recommend it after a long flight so you do not have to wait to shower and rest.

The flight to Auckland from San Francisco was 13 hours long. While a long flight, it was not the longest we had taken; the flight from Sydney via LAX was about 16 hours. We fly business class so there is a laydown seat. All these seats are not created equal *cough*JetBlue*cough* but the United seats were not bad and I slept for a good 8 hours.

Even with that rest, there is some adaption to local time. The first few days we went to sleep at 9-9:30 pm New Zealand time and got up between 5-7am.

We did not do much our first day in– we did not plan on doing anything! We took a walk down Queen street – you should see the high end retail! Van Cleef & Arpels, Dior, Tiffany’s, and much more!

While on Queen street Hubby did a monster money exchange for the nine other countries we would be visiting so we could have a little bit of local currency to start. We wanted to not have to find an ATM if the time in the country was short.

We walked down to the waterfront, ate at a highly rated Italian restaurant, we back to the hotel, and decompressed.

The next day Hubby had booked us a food tour. It was truly excellent. Our guide, Ellie, was the owner, highly engaging, knew her stuff (she was a UK ex-pat) and took us to some unique places.

Auckland has a LOT of Asian restaurants – from Vietnamese to Thai to Japanese, Chinese and Korean, and more.

Our stops were to a local tea shop where we had tea, clotted creams, and crumpets. Then we went to a food court afterwards which was absolutely fabulous where we went to a local Asian restaurant. We had we had rice, wraps, red snapper (if other people had not been around I’d have licked the sauce on the plate, it was that good) and a few other dishes paired with a bitter local ale (I like bitter beers and ales).

The tour was finished off with some (very) high-end chocolate.

Hubby and I then walked about to our hotel and passed by even more high end retail shops and boutiques underneath the food court.

The following day we did a much longer tour. The guide and her trainee were fabulous!

This tour started with a trip to the Auckland Botanic Gardens. The flowers were in bloom, the hardscape was lovely, and it was a nice start to our day.

After that, it was off to Sheepworld Farm Park. I did a nice, long video on the sheep shearing and somehow lost the recording! Grrr

There were a few dogs that went out to round-up the sheep. In addition to the shearing demonstration, there was sorting demonstration. There was also an animal park including alpaca, pigs, goats, and more.

The sheep shearing was interesting. The top photo is our lucky volunteer. The sheep feel better after a shearing, but we were told the wool market is down and shearing sheep is no longer profitable. It only took a minute or two to accomplish, and the sheep was glad to be finished.

There were a lot of children at Sheepworld, and I can see why. Very educational and fun.

We bought some Sheepworld lanolin and now we are hooked. It really is a great softening agent!

To finish this tour (it was a long day), we went to a Manuka honey store and a drive along the coast.

Hubby and I discovered Manuka honey on our last trip to New Zealand. It really does help to combat sore throats. There are different grades of Manuka honey including two medicinal grades, so while we have been buying it online, we really wanted to take the opportunity to buy in New Zealand. The exchange rate was very favorable for us (55¢ US = $1 NZ), so that was helpful!

The next day, Hubby wanted to go down to the Auckland fish market. It was a bust for fresh fish. The large store had frozen fish for sale for unbelievably low prices – for instance monkfish was $5/kilo New Zealand dollars. That is under $1.25/pound US!

There was one fresh fish monger who’s claim to fame is they were the oldest fish monger in New Zealand.

The rest were food stands and one bar.

The birds were relentless! One lady left her food to get a condiment and before she had taken two steps the seagulls swarmed in! She immediately chased them away, but that sign was no joke.

We walked back to our hotel via the waterfront. Hubby stumbled upon a shop selling his favorite Manuka honey throat spray and got it for B2G1 pricing. So, he was happy.

We saw where to catch our ship the next day. We had considered walking from our hotel to the port slip, but with all our baggage we decided to take a cab.

We did not pack light this trip. We had to include some dressier clothing which we normally do not do. We were sailing Silversea for over two months. This includes “dress-up” nights. This was our first time on Silversea and so we were not certain what the alternative was for dinning, if anything, on dress-up nights. So, we packed some more formal attire out of an abundance of caution.

We did learn that for our next trip on Silversea, we will not bother. We will either eat in our cabin (a VERY nice set-up) or go up to the Grill for pizza.

We also had two climates to pack for this trip. Auckland, even though it was summer, was very cool – in the 60s for daytime highs. However, through Northern Australian and Southeast Asia it was going to be in the 90s (or better!) North Korea was also scheduled to be cold (it was), so we had to pack for winter through summer. We packed for layers, gloves, scarves, and hats and it did add up in a suitcase.

One nice thing about our traveling on Silversea – our laundry was free!

We have elite status on Celebrity. It isn’t worth much on Celebrity – one bag of free laundry each. However, that status was reciprocal to Silversea (RCCL owns both) and the Silversea perk at our reciprocal level is free laundry! This was a marvelous perk for 2+ months. (I added it up. It was almost $2K worth of free laundry service + wet cleaning.)

Once we boarded the ship, we found our room, unpacked (the butler could have done it, but I am not British nobility, so passed) walked the ship to get the lay of it, and familiarized ourselves with the amenities.

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