First off, I would like to apologize whole-heartedly for forgetting to include the following in the post about Waiheke Island - this picture is probably one of my favorites of the trip so far:
Oh noooo
Ok, back to Auckland!
After returning from Waiheke, where I (fortunately) did not witness anyone jumping for the ferry, I had dinner and made my way to the Sky Tower, which looks like the Space Needle in Seattle except pointier. Even though visibility wasn't that great, and taking pictures in the dark was rather difficult, I managed to get one or two that weren't totally awful:
The Sky Tower has a nifty little thing (not sure if other tall pointy buildings like the Tower and the Needle have this kind of thing, since I've only ever been in this particular tall pointy building) where they have your usual floor and seats around the rim and windows. And then they also have glass floors which they advertise as a whopping 35mm (1.4ish inches) thick.
Now, I know, glass that thick is as strong as the concrete the rest of the floor was made out of (or so their signs said), but for someone who's not especially keen on heights, man that was a bit gut-wrenching. Even if the glass were a foot thick, if I could see through it, I would still not want to be standing on it. If the concrete was paper-thin, and the glass was the thickest part of the floor, I'd still want to stand on the concrete.
Ok, not quite true, but I would stand on the glass and look at the concrete and pretend that's the material I was standing on.
Either way, I did my duty and walked across a pair of glass floor panels once (while holding on to the railing, but at least I looked down while doing it), then went back to sitting on the benches and trying to get a decent picture.
"Well this is all nice and touristy, I'm glad he had a good time", you must be thinking (assuming that you do not hate me), "the next part is probably about him getting on the bus to Rotorua, wherever that is."
(It's 145 miles/233 km southeast of Auckland)
See, I would like to do that, except that A) that would be too easy and B) that would be skipping probably the most interesting part of the evening.
While many people can probably say "HEY I WENT TO THE SKY TOWER AND SAW THAT STUFF AND TOOK PICTURES AND I JUMPED ON THE GLASS PANELS WHICH HE DIDN'T BECAUSE HE'S A WUSS", probably not as many people can say "HEY I WENT TO SKY TOWER SECURITY AND HAD TO SHOW THEM MY PASSPORT AND GOT TO WAIT AROUND BEHIND THE SCENES WHILE THE SECURITY GUARD MANAGER GUY CAME DOWN FROM THE CASINO."
And I will leave a few spaces here for the imaginative juices to get going, since it's kind of fun to be melodramatic.
And now for the far less interesting truth as to why I wound up in security, giving them my passport and waiting for the lead security chap to come down from the casino:
At some point in my picture taking and multiple seat changes, the case containing my spare glasses fell out of my pocket. I had switched to my good glasses (gasp!) because it was dark and things were a bit far away, neither of which make good conditions for wearing glasses that you stopped using as mains about five years ago.
Now, this wouldn't have been a big deal, except I did not feel them fall out, and by the time I realized I no longer had them (I took the elevator back down and was about to leave, noticed they were gone, and hopped back on the elevator to go back up - not sure if you're supposed to do that without an attendant, since on the way up they got to push the buttons), they were gone. I searched frantically for five or so minutes, making a couple of loops of the tower, when I asked one of the attendants at the top if someone had turned them in.
Someone had! They were sitting in the lost and found, waiting for me to take them home/put them in my pocket. I went down again and was shown to the security area, where I was questioned as to what the glasses looked like and what the case was like.
I guess I passed (which was good, because I had kind of forgotten what the glasses looked like even though I wear them daily), because after taking my passport and contact information, the security guard said I could get them back - when the security manager guy on duty, who had the key to the lost and found, got done dealing with some unruly folks in the casino.
After waiting five minutes, the absurdity of the situation hit me - I was under Sky Tower, I had lost my glasses case containing glasses six years old about 15 or 20 minutes ago, and they needed my passport, a brief questionnaire concerning the lost spectacles, and now I had to wait for the lead security guard to come and open the box. All in all, it took about 20-25 minutes to reclaim my spare spare spare glasses. They may have also taken my picture, I'm not totally sure.
The funniest part about waiting was at some point, a guest who was noticeably...impaired...stumbled into the room (it was just behind a door off of the main little plaza with the elevators, and the door was open), looked around for a minute or so, then wandered off back to the plaza.
Glasses and case in pocket, I went back to the hotel, looking forward to my visit to Rotorua.
I have no pictures of Rotorua or the bus trip to it, because I do not want to remember it. Or I just forgot to take any.
So, Rotorua!
It smells.
It's got a whole bunch of hot springs and bubbly mud pools, which would be really great to visit if it didn't cost around $100 (NZD) to do anything. You can even Zorb (go zorbing?), which looks amazing and I promised someone I would do it for them. Also, it literally smells - because of the mud pools and geothermal whatnots, every now and then (five minutes) you get a lovely whiff of sulfur. It's not a constant thing, so you don't really get used to it, it just...comes and goes.
The problem with all these activities is, along with the price tag associated with *all* of them (Rotorua is a tourist hotspot), none of them are within walking distance - everything is actually *around* Rotorua, not *in* it.
And so, I decided to cut my time in Rotorua (and Taupo) short, since I had no idea how expensive things would be once I got to Napier and actually had to spend money on important things (like food).
I called up the travel agent (on the hotel's phone, the manager of the hotel was amazing and very patient with this whole ordeal) and told her of my plight - after some phone tag and fax tag (or faxes not being sent/sent to the wrong place), I had cancelled my hotel reservations and gotten a pair of bus tickets straight to Napier.
Hooray!
I had been told the bus would pick me up the next morning outside the hotel, so I wouldn't have to lug my bags into town (since I was a good six or so blocks away from the bus stop).
Hooray!
So I spent the evening watching movies on TV (Munich was *long*, but good), because I figured that was pretty much the only way I would not spend any more money.
Relaxing and cheap!
The next morning, the bus didn't come to the hotel.
Boo.
After waiting for an hour outside the hotel (the agent told me one time, the ticket said another, I waited there for both of those times), I decided to just walk into town, get my own bus ticket, and end this mess by just settling in Napier.
Which I did!
That is a story for another post, though! This one is long enough as it is.
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