February 8, 2011

I slept like a baby when we crossed the dateline. Our flight from Rarotonga left at 1pm on Monday February 7 and arrived in Auckland at 4pm on Tuesday February 8, after a flight of 4 hours.

As we approached we got great views of some islands just outside Auckland:

We could see our own shadow:

We were in New Zealand, the country furthest away from Norway (and every country in Europe, for that matter). New Zealand always makes me think about the earth sandwich, a fantastic idea made true in a web video show by the American comedian Ze Frank in 2006. Ze Frank challenged his viewers to create a sandwich by placing two pieces of bread on exactly opposite points of the globe. The task was first completed by teams in New Zealand and Spain, for the first time transforming the entire globe into a large sandwhich.

Two points on opposite sides of the earth are called antipodes. By a freak coincidence almost no land point on earth is an antipode to another land point. In fact, only 4% of land on the earth has land on the other side, and a large chunk of it is arctic/antarctic. This also means that no matter how you cut to split the earth in two equal halves, there will be 4% of the land on each half that has antipodal land on the other side (presuming you just cut and do not actually separate the halves).

Take a look at this illustration showing all land on earth (The illustration has been taken from the Wikimedia Commons). You would be hard pressed to come up with a natural looking land distribution that had so little overlap:

If mankind had had this information a couple of thousand years ago I’m confident that a religion would have been created around it. It cannot be a coincidence, it must be a sign!

Ooops, sorry. There was a great map of New Zealand at the airport in Aukland which we studied with the kids, showing them the places we are going to see:

We are now over 7000 kilometers (4350 miles) from Easter Island. We have flown for a total of 13 hours (Easter Island – Papeete – Rarotonga – Auckland), yet we are still in the Polynesian triangle. The Maori language spoken here is very similar to the one spoken on Easter Island (they both originate from the Society Islands, other Polynesian languages can be much more different). We were met by this magnificent piece of Maori art at the airport.

We said good-bye to our new Norwegian friends, who we had met at the pool in Rarotonga when our flight was delayed:

Roy and Bente were travelling with their son Christian. They had been three weeks on Rarotonga and were now continuing to Australia.

We got our luggage and our rental car without a hassle. We had originally planned to spend our day looking around Auckland, but now that our flight was so delayed there wasn’t much left of the day and we were all tired. We decided to just get to the apartment-hotel where I had rented us an apartment for one night, get some food and then relax.

I got out the electronics-for-a-car kit again and fired up the Navigon for New Zealand GPS app on the iPhone for the first time. I typed in the address and we were up and running. Rolling, rolling, rolling…

As a technology geek I of course did not bother to check any maps. I mean, what’s the point?

After about 40 minutes the GPS told us to turn into a small dead-end street in an industrial area in what was still the countryside. Something didn’t feel right, the apartment-hotel was supposed to be schmack in the middle of the center of Auckland. This is where the GPS said we should sleep for the night:

The sign above the booth says “Pacific Wire, inwards goods, despatch office”

And so it turns out that there are two roads called “Beach Road” in Auckland. After another 40 minutes and a lecture from Helene about double-checking with maps we found our home for the night.

We decided to spend some time in Auckland tomorrow and leave later for our next destination, the Coromandel peninsula.

Eirik

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