Coming to New Zealand has been such a fun experience, and it’s been great to see so many things that I remember from when we were last here. I have enjoyed seeing all the similarities and differences from what I remember – so I decided to write them down into a blog post – enjoy Part 2 of the series!

Sky Tower
My memory of going up this building, the tallest in the Southern Hemisphere, was fairly vivid – and it’s been a big ‘Want to do’ thing for me. I remember standing near the base of the building, giving the sense of the immense size of it, looking at a massive pillar of concrete in the foundation and realising it was one of 16, and then going up the lift, which took quite a while to ascend the first proper floor after the elevator shaft – I hadn’t remembered the glass floor in the lift, though! One of my favourite memories of the sky tower was probably standing on the glass flooring and looking down more than 150m to the city below, but I also enjoyed watching the sky jumpers flying off the tower on a rope and a harness – there was a countdown timer by one of the windows so we could be ready to watch.

Waiwera
Waiwera, a place where there is a swimming pool for almost anything you can imagine – warm pools, hot pools, very hot pools, baby pools, slide pools, even a Movie pool – you probably wouldn’t be surprised if you found a back-filp  diving into free Wifi pool!!! -so wish that was a thing! I have fond memories of spending an afternoon relaxing and swimming, changing pools whenever it suited – it was a brilliant experience and I’d been looking forward to doing it again. One of the things I remembered best was the slide tower, which you had to climb up to do the big flumes, of course, I only remember the little slide as I was too small – but, this time I got to go on one of the massive, twisting slides. It was very exciting speeding down, slowly at first, then faster, then faster, then eerily fast, then, when you were wondering if it would ever stop – SPLASH!! -you were slowed down to a halt in what felt like less than 2 seconds. I had a lot of fun swimming there, though some of the pools were just too hot – the more than 48°C Lava Pool was definitely too hot by some way, at least for us – but on the whole it was an amazing experience!

Sugar Cane
Another memory, as well as something I’ve really been looking forward to is eating raw sugar cane, very tasty and unusual, it’s just a shame you can’t get them in Britain. When we had them on our 6 month visit, we had some large bought cane – this time when we had it we ate some relatively narrow sugar cane grown in Nan an Granddad’s garden. Sugar cane is certainly very sweet – but often the best things are hard to get at: it took quite some time to work out how to dissect it to eat it!