last day in NZ

Tomorrow we are flying out for an almost eight hour flight to Perth. Looking forward to getting home and sitting in the sun without a freezing gale blowing.

Today we took the Auckland Explorer @ $30 each. It does two routes and passengers can get off at stops of interest and reboard at specific times. We both had a horror night with coughing, headaches and runny noses, so didn't enjoy many of the sites. The Auckland Museum is an architect's dream and it houses, amongst other things, a vast collection of Pacific Island heritage items. Beautiful! We also visited MOTAT (the Museum of Transport and Technology) which was OK....6/10. Whilst we were there there were a couple of primary schools visiting. The museum is going to regret that visit. There was an exhibition on the evolution of computers and those knobs and switches got a good work out.

Auckland is the big smoke of NZ. 1.5 million people live here out of a total population of 4.28 million. That is not counting sheep. It may well be that our motel is in a different area, but there seem to be thousands of Chinese people here. Another thing we noticed as we walked out for a meal last night is that there is a lot of rubbish in the street and especially on escalators and stairs: cigarette butts everywhere. There are also large groups of Maori and Asian youth congregating even in the windy areas. They are doing the usual things young people do...leave rubbish, bottles and Macca wrappings around. The older I get the less democracy I wish to afford young people.

We walked out to try and buy a bottle of bubbly only to find that Auckland seems to have different laws/customs to the South Island and booze cannot be bought in grocery stores. We had to pay top dollar for wines or buy cheap Italian imports which we did.

Kev: on Joan's account