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

I went for a walk to see some gardens one day last week. The Domain is a large park in central Auckland. It is a huge expanse of lawn, hills on both sides forming a natural amphitheatre. There are some birds nesting in the little ponds, and these ones came forward as soon as I approached and sat down. I found out later these pukeko's I think they are called, are carnivorous. For a bird, that means only that they will eat baby chicks, fortunately for me sitting alone on the bench. There is a huge show on Dec 10 there, attended by thousands. It is the Christmas show for all of Auckland. I was staying a couple of blocks away and wandered over. The peaceful scene was transformed by throngs of people and long lines ... read more

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