Greetings from New Zealand

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We have been in NZ for 3 days now, and have already packed in a great deal of sight-seeing and activity, a welcome and much needed tonic after the last stressful few months back home. It's hard to know what to describe and what to leave out, but to start at the beginning with...

The flight.
We were booked with Air New Zealand, flying from Heathrow to Auckland via Hong Kong - 2 x 11 hour flights with a 2 hour stopover in HK. I was rather dreading this marathon, but it turned out to be far less of an ordeal than I had imagined, and the time was passed by taking advantage of the excellent in-flight entertainment with individual screens and selection of a vast range of movies, games etc. We left London at about 10pm on Friday, arriving in Auckland on the Sunday morning, local time.

We picked up the hire car, and set off to our hotel, showered, changed etc, then decided to have a lazy afternoon exploring the coast near the hotel. It was a lovely sunny afternoon, although there was a chilly breeze. We drove along past several beautiful beaches, passing a children's party with marquee and BBQ on one beach - and Ho, Ho, Ho, Father Christmas in full regalia of red costume and beard, which looked extremely incongruous there in the sunshine, on the beach - as did all the Christmas decorations in the shops, streets and hotel when it was so summery and warm outside. We decide to adjourn to a beach cafe, and sipping a cold white Chardonnay in the summer sun was most pleasant (sorry, Kim, but it wasn't a cocktail!). We then visited a very interesting aquarium - the forerunner to all the modern ones where you walk through the tunnel, and the sea creatures swim around you. There was a fantastic collection of huge stingrays which were fascinating to watch, but after that we decided to head into Auckland city centre and explore. A quick tour of the shops had Eric looking at a range of All Blacks memorabilia - his grandfather, also called Eric, was in the first international touring team in the early 1900's - but he resisted (for now) the urge to buy a replica shirt.

Auckland being the City of Sails, we walked round the harbour area, looking at the amazing competition yachts moored there, then had an early dinner. After more than 40 hours awake, I suddenly had great difficulty keeping my eyes open whilst waiting for the meal to be served, and kept drifting off to sleep. So after dinner, it was straight back to the hotel, and tucked up in bed by 9 pm - followed by hours and hours of much needed sleep.

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