March 24 - Our first breakfast at the B&B was amazing! Beautifully presented in a huge basket delivered to our door, with lots of fresh fruit, incredible yogurt (definitely NOT low fat!) and fantastic pastries. We have a little kitchen in our room with all kinds of goodies in the cupboards - super coffee, every tea you could think of, home made granola and on and on. So we can make tea or coffee whenever we want, and we have a fridge so we’ve got butter, milk and cheese so we can snack too. This will be our downfall! Karen (our hostess) also appears from time to time with more things to eat - the most decadent fudge, pastries - help! We spent today cleaning up the campervan and returning it to the airport which seemed to be about 500 miles south of the city (Andrew - I can now fully sympathize with you and the Edmonton Airport!) We picked up a little (“little” being the operative word) car to run around in while we’re in Auckland. We are staying in a suburb called Devonport which is across the bay from Auckland and the B&B is about a mile out of the town, so it will be handy to be able to get around independently. On our way home, we drove up one of Auckland’s volcanic lumps (the most recent erupted 600 years ago - not that long!) where you get an amazing view of the city and the harbour. We timed it beautifully as there was an international sailing race going on - we counted 61 boats battling it out in a really strong wind - some very exciting moments when seen from up above!
March 25 - We hopped on a ferry over to Auckland in the pouring rain. We have had amazing luck with the weather up until now, so we can certainly put up with a few drips, especially as they are very short of moisture here at the moment. We braved the showers and walked around the Viaduct Harbour where my guidebook told me all the millionaires keep their boats. This time, the guidebook was correct! John was ecstatic! There were some HUGE sailboats - one so big that he needed to use the panorama feature of his camera to fit it in! He reckoned it was about 200 feet long. The boom on the mainsail was probably longer than our boat! What I noticed was a car with “Boat Cleaning Services” on its side. This was not someone who would clean your deck - this was Molly Maid for your yacht! We saw the lady in one boat with her vacuum cleaner! I suppose if you can afford a boat that big, dusting the interior is not high on your priority list! The rain eventually got the better of us, so we took refuge in the Maritime Museum which was right next door. It was very good and we ended up spending 3 hours in there. I looked at my watch at 5:10, noticed that we were the only people around and realized that the museum had closed! Luckily we met a little man who was turning off all the video displays so he let us out! The museum covered a huge chunk of stuff (witness my word finding difficulties! There has to be a better way to say that but I can’t come up with it at the moment.) There was a complete display on the final days of sailing ships carrying grain around Cape Horn, a whole area on Maori boats and navigation, discovery and mapping of New Zealand, the arrival of new New Zealanders, tiny boats, huge boats, lighthouses and on and on. Once we got home, we borrowed some DVDs from Karen and decided to start watching the Lord of the Rings series. I read the books years and years ago but never saw the movies. On all our travels around New Zealand, we haven’t been able to avoid seeing books, post cards etc about hobbits, rings etc. etc. as lots of it was filmed here, so we thought we should see what it was all about. John was not impressed!
March 26 - Back to Auckland on the ferry again as some of John’s photographs from yesterday didn’t turn out to his satisfaction! We wandered around the down town area and managed to finish up our gift shopping. We are meeting some friends of John’s in Japan so need to take something to them and we are trying to bring something home for our kids (warning to kids: I’ve found some silly things as well as what I hope will be OK things!) We did go and look at the Sky Tower (at 328 meters high, it’s the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere) - notice I said “look“. You can go up in a lift and walk out on a glass floor to look down (no thank you), or walk around the outside of the tower at the top with no rails or balcony (they do give you a safety harness) or leap off the top attached to a harness (NO THANK YOU). So we can say that we were there. (You can see it on the horizon in the photo with some tiny little men playing cricket in the foreground!) Only 2 weeks now until we will be home which is hard to imagine. I’m packing up another big box of extra clothes etc. to send home so we won’t have too much stuff to schlep around Japan with us (there is a disturbing number of times I have used “stuff” in this blog …..)
March 27 - Mabel (our GPS computer lady) is wonderful, especially in big cities where they are doing lots of road work and everyone goes so fast. She tells you where to go in time for you to be in the right lane, and only occasionally does she have a bad hair day. So THANK YOU again to Andy and Zoe for sending her along with us - I honestly don’t know what we would have done without her (and she has undoubtedly been better for our relationship than me trying to read a map!!) Today she directed us to a suburb of Auckland called Parnell where I had read about a fair where there would be lots of old motor bikes, including one of Burt Munroe’s from Invercargill (remember him? The World’s Fastest Indian?). The “fair” turned out to be not at all what a British brain interprets as a fair. Basically, the main street of Parnell had roped off a small area for the bikes (about 40, John says some of them quite rare) and most of the restaurants had “offers” for meals, like $4 glass of wine to celebrate the fair. Oh yes, and there were 3 scantily dressed ladies with huge head-dresses who did some Brazilian hip shaking things!! So again, John took many photographs (not sure which got more attention - the bikes or the ladies). We found a really nice little place for lunch (Parnell is “the” place to go to eat), and then asked Mabel to take us to the Botanic Gardens. (I figured that the past couple of days had largely been filled with boats and bikes - now it was my turn!) I was driving, and I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with where Mabel was directing me. We decided to trust her for a while and see where we ended up, turned a corner and her next direction was “proceed to the ferry”! She had taken us right down town Auckland to the ferry terminal. The Botanic Gardens are the other side of the harbour, but there is no ferry that goes there and down town in a big city is not a great place to stop and figure out what’s going on. However, John managed to persuade her that there was a dry land way to get there, and once she agreed to do it our way, she was fine. However the Botanic Gardens were something of a disappointment (and it was quite a drive to get there - about 30 km from the city). We have been to quite a number of gardens as those of you who have been following the blog will know. Auckland’s just didn’t measure up to some of the others we have seen. To be fair, they have had a prolonged dry spell here (even though it has rained a fair bit since we’ve been here) so all the grass looked rather sad, but the whole place had an air of neglect about it. Signposts were not very good and it just didn’t seem to be very loved. They were building a couple of new areas so maybe all their efforts are directed there at present, but we weren’t impressed. Also to be fair it’s autumn here so a lot of the flowers are gone anyway, but comparing it to Christchurch, Brisbane and Sydney, it was at the bottom of the list. Karen and Pete had invited us for dinner, so we made our way home to a really good meal. They are a very welcoming couple and we really enjoyed their company - and a wonderful meal. They have really gone out of their way to make our stay a good one e.g. Karen went to about 3 different hardware stores for us to replace the microwave tray from the campervan that had got broken - well beyond the call of duty!
Only 3 more days in Auckland and then off to Japan. I’m not sure how easy it will be to blog from there. We are on a tour - one of those “You will get up at 6 and be on the bus at 6:30” things - so there may not be a lot of opportunity to blog. But I will keep typing and maybe post the last bit from home.
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