New Zealand -Auckland and the North Island (Friday 5th - Friday 12th December)

Early morning flight to NZ. We left Tahiti at 7.30 am Thursday but due to crossing the International Dateline on route we lost a day and arrived in Auckland lunchtime Friday. We are now 13 hours ahead of the UK. Apart from myself other major celebrities arriving in Auckland that weekend included David Beckham and Kylie Minogue. An old friend Simon was at the airport to meet us and whisk us away to his home in Devonport on the North Shore. Within 3 hours we were sailing in Auckland Harbour on Simon's boat with his friend Hugh. We were meant to be taking part in the popular rum race round the harbour which is held every Friday but for some reason the main sail could not be hoisted so we finished up doing our own more relaxed sail. They were kind enough to let me navigate for part of the way. It was a lovely way of spending a Friday afternoon and a great start to our New Zealand leg of the journey. The rest of the weekend was spent with our very hospitable hosts Simon and Michelle who were kind enough to show us around Devonport and other areas of Auckland including Mission Bay, Auckland Domain and Takapuna market.

The best way to explore NZ is by car. On Monday we picked up our hire car from Scotties, one of the smaller and cheaper car hire companies in the country. We have got our Ford Mondeo for 11 days and plan to drive down as far as Queenstown on the South Island before dropping the car off in Christchurch before flying back to Auckland. Early impressions of driving through NZ is that is like being back in Scotland. You drive on the left and the scenery, road signs and even the dull drizzly weather remind me of Scotland. There are some differences obviously there are very few (none) vineyards in Scotland and here distances are measured in kilometres.

Our first stop was in Rotorua about 100 miles south of Auckland. Its a good base to see Maori culture and thermal hot springs / spas. The only problem with Rotorua is that the town literally stinks of rotten eggs -something to do with the sulphur? We stayed at the Sudima Hotel which hosts a Maori dinner and show every evening. I normally don't like this sort of thing (Tango evening in Buenos Aires comes to mind) but this was great fun and good value for money. The Hangi meal (which traditionally is meat cooked slowly in the ground for a number of hours) was good and the music was superb. Only down side was being dragged up on stage to try and learn the Haka. We also tried the nearby Polynesian Spa which has a number of thermally heated pools. Only an hour down the road from this was the Waiotapa Thermal Wonderland which had been recommended by Diana and Laura. It's a panorama of hot and cold pools, boiling mud pools, and hissing fumaroles (to quote from the guide book). Unfortunately we missed the geyser which is active every day at 10.15 ? (how does it know the time ?)Its all very colourful and well worth a visit.

Second stop was Napier on the Pacific east coast. It's a lovely small town with most of the buildings in the centre built in an Art Deco style in the 1930's - lots of pastel colours and elaborate motifs. It had a good feel about it and was a place we could have spent more time in. Next day headed south and took a little detour to the town of Martinborough which is now the centre of a number of newish wineries. Had time to do a bit of winetasting before we met up with Dave and Helen Duncan. They are also doing a fair bit of travelling. So far they have been to California, Mexico and the Cook Islands. They happened to be travelling north in NZ as we were heading south. We met up for lunch to compare notes and catch up on old news.

From there we headed to the capital Wellington which is on the southern tip of the North Island.We were only there one night so did not have time to do or see much apart from the Museum Te Papa Tongarewa which is one of the largest national museums in the world. It offers visitors interactive experiences of NZ's Maori heritage, national history and environment. Fortunately it was open late on a Thursday so we managed to spend a couple of hours there before it closed. It's a fantastic museum and what's even better is that it is free. On the Friday morning we also managed to fit in a cable car ride up to the Botanic Gardens and a walk back down again before we had to catch the ferry to the South Island.