Traveling to New Zealand
On December 7th I left to go to New Zealand and start work and travel. I had a 45h flight ahead of me. It was 11 am in Germany when I left, but we flew into the night. So at 3 pm German time I got to watch the sunset over the snowy mountains in Turkey.
After a 12h flight, we arrived in Taipei, Taiwan. I had a layover of 18 hours here. We arrived at 6 am, so I had the full day in Taipei. I met three other people on the plane, and two at the airport who also had an 18h long layover. Five of us were about to start doing work and travel, while the other one did work and travel two years ago, and was on his way to visit his girlfriend in Australia. So almost all of us were in the same situation. We decided to go into the city and explore Taipei together. We had a great time there and saw all the sights one should go to in Taipei, including the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, a Hindu Temple, and Elephant Mountain. The best thing, though, was Taipei 101. That is an over 500m tall tower, which used to be the tallest building in the world. We got to go up to the 90th floor on an elevator, which used to be the fastest elevator in the world with a 600m/min speed. The view was incredible! We got to see all of Taipei from above. It suddenly looked like a miniature city. It was so fascinating to watch the traffic.
I will say, though, Taipei is not the prettiest city. We basically did every touristy thing within those 18 hours. There's not much else to discover. Everything is very gray, everything looks very similar. The people are very nice, though, and help you as much as they can. We did not see that many people out on the streets during the day. It felt like a dead city. We felt like we were disturbing the silence with every word we spoke. That was until the sunset. Suddenly everyone came to the streets. People played games, and listened to music,... It felt like the city suddenly woke up from a deep sleep.
Eventually, we headed back to the airport. We discovered that four of us were on the same flight to Brisbane, while the other two were headed to Sydney. After another 12h flight, we arrived in Brisbane. When I booked my flight it said that I would go straight from Taipei to Auckland, but apparently not. We had a 2h layover in Brisbane. We thought it was just to get fuel, but all of us had to get out of the plane and go through security again, just to board the same plane again at a different gate. That flight was another 3h.
I finally arrived in Auckland on December 9th at 7pm NZ time. After over 50h of traveling - counting from when I left my parent's house till I arrived at the hostel - I was very tired and ready to go to bed. That night I slept very well.
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