Blogs from Auckland, North Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 335

A fancy dress affair...... read more

Dear All, The flight from Hawaii to New Zealand is not a long one, merely a little confusing as you only need to put your watch back an hour, but you have lost an entire day. We flew from Honolulu at midnight on Sunday and, after a lay-over in Fiji, landed safely in Auckland on Tuesday afternoon. Everything went smoothly, except for the stop-over on Samoa (due to bad weather in Fiji, making landing a problem) and our bags not arriving in Auckland. However, all these troubles soon disappeared as we met Morag at the airport. It was the most amazing thing, here were two friends who had not seen each other for about 9years, but it was as if we only said goobye to one another yesterday. She had very kindly taken the afternoon off ... read more

A few shots of the Mission Bay area.... read more

13th November 2005 Didn't exist! Don't you love the International Dateline? Auckland and beyond 14-26/11/05 So, we made it to New Zealand by 6.30 am on the 14th, only one hour late but a number of passengers had to make internal connections and were panicking over the delay, we sat back and let them all flap about, then wandered off the plane and into passport control where everybody got to queue for about 45 minutes anyway. By the time we got through our bags were happily going round and round on the carousel so we grabbed them and made our way over to the "stupidly big and just plain weird" baggage area where we found three baby buggies, two removals boxes, one bag of golf clubs, a shoe and a bloke waiting for his guitar. After ... read more

After several days of overcast skies and a bite in the wind, today is sunny and warm. I hiked around the beachfront by Mission Bay from my Uncle's place in Kohimarana, and found my way into this privately run Aquarium. I always enjoy going to these places. This one is made from the old sewer system of Auckland, if you can believe it!!! The guy Kelly T. is a former diver who wanted to expose the ordinary man (and tourist) to the pleasures of marine life. He made this underwater plastic tunnel to walk through which is quite amazing. Of course I spent a few hours in there getting up close and personal with the crayfish - the size of huge lobsters but without the big claws, sting rays and the like. The sting rays are ... read more