Happy Diwali – 2 weeks in advance

Well, there was a Diwali Mela in the Auckland CBD 27th and 28th October. We had gone there along with our friends R and P on the second day in the evening, for the first time I saw such a big crowd of people where I had to jostle my way through in NZ. It was really like a mela, with all the stalls selling chaat, dosas, kulfi name any Indian food and you found it there. Then there were art and craft stalls, stalls selling jewellery you had lady doing Mehendi (Henna) on the hands.

In the centre of all this, there was a huge stage where you had participants’ dancing to popular bollywood songs, there was a dance competition organised. They had also organised for a Bollywood celebrity to grace the occasion. At the end there were fireworks organised too. The first day of the mela in terms of performances focused more on classical music and dances; there were performances right from morning till night and following day was focused on the bollywood and Bhangra crowd. I thought it was very well organised, keeping in mind the large Indian immigrant population in Auckland, they had programs and activities for every age group.

I found so many stalls selling glass bangles, immediately I picked up a dozen to match my Karwa Chauth outfit the next day. There was another lady who was doing mehendi on the hands for about 10 dollars, both me and P enthusiastically got that done as well. Pity that we had an early dinner at home, so I did not have the appetite to have taste any of the Indian food that I crave for very often.

It was a really good way to mark the season of festivities, I am so glad that we had gone for it. Otherwise in a foreign land festivals just whisk by and you don’t even realise it unless you receive a call from home and then you go into a nostalgic trip down the memory lane.

House Hunting

Last weekend was so much fun, we spent Saturday visiting different open homes. One of our goals is to buy our first home by the end of this year. To meet this objective, we have decided that each weekend we will spend one day in checking out homes for sale or open homes.

Auckland region is very vast, there is Central Auckland and then surrounding it are the suburbs of East, West, North and South Auckland. From my experience browsing through different website and going through the weekly property press, the houses and the real-estate business in general in very different from the way things work in India.

The layout and plans of most houses is strikingly different from what one finds in India. The concept of having more than one bathroom has not set in yet. In India one would most likely have the 2BHK with two bathrooms or a 3BHK with 2 or I think 3 is more common. Here I have seen houses with 3 – 6 bedrooms but the luxury of one huge bathroom. Families with 2 -3 school going children dwell in such places. One will mostly find house built of weatherboard, timber and brick and tile is catching up but mostly with new homes. On the other hand one can find character homes or cottages , that look they are out of some movie in 50’s and 60’s and quiet expensive to own. Then one can find townhouses, where you have a gated colony of anywhere from over 5 houses that look the same from outside and have a similar layout and the drawback being you cannot make any enhancements or changes to the property, but the advantage being you don’t need to maintain a garden and mow lawns. Apartments are very common in the city centre and nowadays one does find apartments coming up in suburbs as well, but why would one move to a suburb to purchase an apartment, when you can conveniently do that in the city. Most apartments in the city are like pigeon holes, luckily the one A found for us is much spacious compared to rest. We currently live in a two bedroom and single bathroom place and we have a spacious balcony facing the sky tower. I love our apartment, if only it had bigger kitchen, another bathroom and a bedroom, I would not want to budge an inch.

As I mentioned earlier real estate is big business here. You will find a weekly property press, which is like a weekly magazine where all the real estate agents and companies advertise. I think these release in five editions, central, eastern, northern and western respectively. Depending upon which suburb one lives in, you will receive the property process of that area in your mailbox free of cost every week. Apart from this, one can also find listing online either on www.trademe.co.nz or my favourite www.realestate.co.nz . I like the latter because the one can filter the search results better and the results are more specific. This business is also very organised, one look the homes on sale on days and timings when there is an open home, which will be posted in the advertisement with the house. These mostly happen over the weekend, and the duration can be anywhere from 30 mins to 1 hour.

Also there are different ways one sells property, a lot of people choose to auction, or ask buyers to submit a tender, or there is a rent to buy option. A lot of instances especially for places close to the city, the property will be under a lease, so one buy such property sometime less than halve the market value but go on paying an annual lease for the next 20 years or so. I have seen another case where one buys the property with a clear title, but the owner does not sell the land, so one pays a monthly rent for the land to the owner. If I find something which is too good to be true, there it is either leasehold or has some other additional recurring cost.

The modern homes as they are called are these houses that are built of brick and tile, have three to four bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, internal access garage and a fancy kitchen. This is the kind of house that both A and me like, and it does fall within our budget as well, but the only problem here is the suburbs where they are located are usually quiet far from the city, some are so new that they are very accessible to public transport, basic amenities, one needs to drive down for basic necessities like groceries etc.

We are in dilemma and this is a call that we will need to take soon. More then A, I see this as a huge challenge, we currently live in an apartment in the Auckland CBD, a 5 min walk to work, whenever I run out of Aloo, Pyaaz, Adrak, Mirchi, Tomatoes I run down to the superette right opposite our building and dinner is ready on time. If I need to shop for my self as in clothes, shoes or go to the library, a salon everything is within a 5 - 10 minute radius. The biggest crippling factor in my case if we move out of the city is that I don’t drive! But I intend on learning very soon.

Weekend getaway - Lake Taupo

Let me start by warning you that A and I fall among the most laid back of the Hyderabadi pack. We planned to leave Auckland by 7:30am-8am in the morning, but by the time we woke up, finished our daily chores and quickly packed it was almost 9 am by the time we hit the road. We both were really excited as this was the first time that we were going on a road trip and in our new ride (which we bought in June this year).

It felt so nice as we hit the road started driving out of Auckland and getting into the suburbs and then finally into the countryside, which is so green with spots of black, brown and white (the sheep and cows) grazing. I suddenly felt so happy seeing cattle for the first time since my move to NZ, seeing cows, buffalo's and sheep is a common sight anywhere in India. After about driving for one hour we stopped at a McDonald's and had a quick breakfast. I am not too much of a fast food person; the closest I can get to it is having a subway sandwich (which I completely enjoy) or if I am left with no choice on days when A has a BK craving, I end up as the sole person having salad in a burger joint. After A feasted on his big breakfast and me on my measly bagel we set on our non stop drive to Taupo.

We reached in about two and half hours, and instead of going straight to the motel we made a stop at Huka Falls scenic lookout. It was beautiful, take a look at the picture below.

After taking a walk down the place, we decided to check into our motel. As we were driving down the along the lake, we both had our own apprehensions about the place, since we decided on really cheap accommodation as it was a matter of just spending one night. We were sure that our motel definitely could not afford a lake facing spot and would be somewhere, hidden inside the alleys. Not sure about what to expect, I was all prepared with our towels & toiletries, if given a chance I would brought bed linen along! To our surprise the our motel was not even close to what we were expecting, it was facing the lake, the room was neat as a pin, we had complementary snacks, a well stocked and equipped loo (so necessary) and what made A really happy was television with sky movies :) they had a sauna, spa and swimming pool too.

It was lunch time, we had seen a string of restaurants by the lake and decided to go and try one them. After some indecisive walking and checking places out we decided to eat at this café called Jay Jays, A had a Panini whereas I stuck to my safe bet and ordered salad with beer, weird combination isn’t it. It has been more than a year since I had beer, and when a holiday on a sunny day what can be better than a mug of beer under the sun! After filling our stomachs, we went through the various tourism pamphlets about Taupo, there was just so many things to do that one day is definitely not enough. Given the time and distance of the places we decided to go and see the Thermal Valley; this is a huge reserve with a lot of domestic animals and birds that move around freely in their natural habitat. There was a little cat that caught A’s fancy and he decided to call it “Cat the Billi” and this four legged creature was our companion Like most places in New Zealand, one covers the place on foot and this is called a bush walk, I really like this concept. There are laid out pathways and directions and none of the natural greenery and surrounding are disturbed. This place had a little cafe attached to it, which served excellent tea, the best that I have had so far New Zealand.

Wairakei Thermal Valley

That evening after the visit to the thermal park, we went down for drive around Taupo and wandered into a suburb called Acacia Bay, they had some really beautiful homes, so well done up and with all the landscaping etc, one house better than the other, I did not see any average or mediocre units. Whenever I see such beautiful homes, I have this urge to knock and go inside and see what the place is like inside. While driving back to the motel, I don’t know why but I started thinking about what to cook the following week and as soon as we saw a supermarket, I dragged A to stop the car so I could buy some essentials for the following week, so amidst our holiday we managed to do some groceries too. Marriage does bring about such changes!

I was not keen on being too adventurous for dinner as I was really hungry, so I took the initiative and found an Indian restaurant called Jewels of India, from one of the tourism booklet. The place was all ethnically done up, to me it looked like the one of who designed and decorated the restaurant, raided Gurjari or one of the likes. We had Chicken Tikka Masala with Naan, which was not exactly the way it should taste, it tasted different and close to Indian so I liked it.

The next morning we left for Mt Ruapehu around 9am, this place is a drive up the mountain from Taupo is a 1.5 hrs drive. As we were driving after about 45 mins we realised that the way seemed wrong as it showed no boards leading Ruapehu anywhere, instead it was showing us the way to Wellington!!! In all our enthusiasm, me immersed in the scenery outside and A with speeding and finding another care he can overtake and pin down, we stopped looking at signboards. It is really difficult to take a U turn in these highways, as vehicles are moving at high speed on both directions and to top it we were going up the mountain, with a lot of curves and bends. After a detour of over 50kms we reached Ruapehu, only to see the board saying ski fields closed today due to bad weather. This sure was a let down, since the whole purpose of our trip was to go skiing and Taupo was more like a stopover. Since there is nothing much to do except sking in Ruapehu so we decided not too waste any further time and took the same road back to Taupo. As we were about to leave I could feel small droplets on me, at first it felt like rain but on closer inspection it was so snow. So there I was experiencing my first ever snowfall, not bad for all the trouble taken. Once we got to Taupo it was 12 noon, we had a quick bite at Subway and headed for the Huka Jet boat ride. We wanted to do something adventurous like bungee or sky dive, but settled for the jet boat ride as our first step to the world of adventure sports. This is boat that travels at 80 kms per hours and flips 360 degrees while in motion.

Huka Jet Boat Ride

With the tickets for this ride we got a free entry to the Taupo Hot Springs spa, we didn’t want to waste our free gift so went to the SPA spent some time there, before starting on our journey back to Auckland. End result of this trip; I had seen and experienced some things for the first time in my life , like the snowfall, hot springs, jet boat ride and two rainbows in one day.

Useful Information for anyone planning on visiting Taupo in NZ.

To book a hotel/motel, we used www.wotif.co.nz , a very useful website to book accommodation suiting all budgets, not only for Taupo but anywhere in NZ.

The Huka Falls Jey Boat ride website is http://www.hukafallsjet.com/

This website gives all the information needed if one plans to visit Taupo www.laketauponz.com

Offff

We are finally off on our first weekend getaway .. thought this is a good time to make a start at blogging !!!! Details to come soon :)