After waking up far too early this morning to set up a bank account I decided to go on my own little adventure to visit a place called Takapuna just north of central Auckland. While still technically part of Auckland, Takapuna is more of a suburb with its own shops, bars and chilled out areas. I was recommended to visit there by a supplier that I used to work with who used to live there for a few years and I must say his advice was spot on. Even though it was slightly overcast at times today the beach was still pretty nice and all the bars and restaurants running parallel all seemed quite nice and chilled out.
Getting to Takapuna was a little mission on its own as it is a 
bit out of the way from the City centre so there are only really 2 options for public transport.
1) Get the bus from the main bus station which takes about 45 mins to get there
2) Catch the ferry across the bay and then walk which takes about 1hr30 in total.
Since I had nothing better to do today I decided it best to take the ferry and then walk it, seeing some sites and suburbs along the way. While grabbing my stuff from my room to set off I saw one of the girls I was sharing the room with and said she could join me if she wanted since she also had nothing better to do and so we became wanderers together for the day. The weird thing is that until we got back to the hostel hours later and bumped into someone else we hadn’t actually realised that we didn’t know each others names. We had spoke last night in the room before everyone went to sleep, however everyone else was in the room and I came into the middle of a conversation and so missed the introductions. Seems very weird now that we went out for about 6 hrs and didn’t have a clue of each others names!
Straight away at the start of the walk I was not disappointed when we spotted a nice little bay with beautiful water about 5 mins into the walk. It looked awesome, however it was the last beautiful thing we saw for a little while as we walked through suburbia on our way to Takapuna. After about an hour we managed to find our way down a side street and finally onto the beach where we could walk from there down to the main centre of Takapuna and grab something to eat.
Even though the temperature was not super hot and the sun 
had hidden away it was still quite nice out and fun to just take a walk on the beach by the waves and chill out. A few braver people were swimming or windsurfing in the bay but in my opinion it was far too cold for that and they were probably the local crazies!
By the time we had finished our wandering and grabbed something to eat both of us felt completely dead on our feet so we decided to cheat by getting a bus back from Takapuna to the ferry and avoid another massive trek. The honesty of the bus driver we had was also really refreshing and nice to see. When we got on the bus we told him that we wanted to go to the Bayswater ferry terminal and he told us that it was $4. We paid without issue and then set off on the route. About half way there when we next stopped to let some people off the bus he got out of his seat and walked down to us to explain that he had mistakenly charged us for going to another ferry terminal 
further on his route and that it should have only cost us $2 each and so gave us both our extra $2 back. It was really nice to see as our receipts said $4 on them and we had no way of knowing if he hadn’t of told us and we had no issues with it being that price anyway. Its just nice to know that there are good people about.
I have no clue what to do tonight but I think it might be laundry and an early night since I nearly fell asleep a few times during today. Maybe even just chill out and read a book for a while. Who knows… I’m sure I will tell you tomorrow!
