Massive update, part I (Auckland)

Part II-Part III

It's hard to say what my first impression was when we first landed in Auckland Aug. 30, at just before 5 a.m. local time, other than fatigue. Broken sleep on an airplane, even during a 12-hour flight, just doesn't cut it. Thankfully we were able to navigate our way to the hostel, despite some confusion about where to pick up our pre-arranged bus passes, and when we got to the hostel sometime before 7 a.m. they gave us a room, allowing us to add a few hours to our sleep total and check out Auckland as not-quite-stark-raving lunatics.
Auckland is an odd city. Our hostel was right in the heart of Queen Street, the city's main commercial strip, and the first-day impressions of Auckland tended to be of a bustling, vibrant city. Every block on Queen Street is packed with businesses, the sidewalks are full, and high-rise buildings line the street. It appears to be a city much larger than its 1.2 million people.
However, after walking around Queen Street and its environs a few times, you realize that's really all there is, at least for someone without a car. The bustle is confined, more or less, to a half-mile long, three-block wide strip, and there doesn't seem to be a ton of nightlife. Even a trip up to K Road, which is supposed to be one of the hip nightlife districts, showed little other than a few overpriced bars far apart from each other.
That's not to say we didn't have fun in Auckland. But the city is more than twice as large as any other city in New Zealand - you'd think it'd be the place to be. Instead, even the locals we ran into said Auckland wasn't exactly a happening place, certainly not as much as you'd expect.
It was good to spend four or five days there, though. We took a free city tour given by one of the backpacker tour companies - there are at least two companies that have bus routes around the country, and try to gain business with free Auckland tours. The tour guide had fun with the four-hour trip, and it got us to places around Auckland we certainly wouldn't have seen otherwise, such as Mount Eden, an inactive volcano providing a panoramic view of the city (and the volcanic cone).
There wasn't much else of note done in Auckland - a couple nights at the backpackers' bar downstairs, and a couple nights of looking for cheaper places, and then learning the $5 beers at the backpacker bar were cheap. One night, still not quite on a normalized sleep cycle, we simply headed up the street to see Batman Begins which I had missed in its theater run in the States.

Before we left the U.S. we'd booked a package deal at our hostel. I'm not sure it ended up being a good deal, but it did give us free transportation to the Bay of Islands, a trip we certainly wouldn't have done otherwise, and one that turned out to be the best part of our opening week.

Part II-Part III