Tuesday 1 November: Auckland

Flying west across the Pacific we lost an entire day, so halloween didn't happen for us. Never mind - the flight had enough horrors of its own. Not really - it was just very boring and claustrophobic sitting in a confined space for 13 hours. Muscles and heads were aching when we finally arrived at Auckland at 4:30am. Who sets these schedules for crying out loud? What's wrong with a sensible arrival time like eight o'clock?

New Zealand has stringent quarantine procedures, and it took quite a long time to get out of the airport. We got the shuttle to the Ibis hotel, expecting to deposit our luggage and be told to come back at check-in time this afternoon. Wonder of wonders the hotel had a vacant room so we were able to check in straight away. We crashed for a few hours.

Feeling somewhat refreshed after a rest, shower and change of clothes, we headed into the city. The lovely girl on reception had suggested that public transport wasn't much good and it's only a few minutes by taxi - more on this later.

Auckland is a vibrant city about the same size as Perth. It's been going through a tremendous renewal, with lots of new hotels, apartments and restaurants springing up along the waterfront. We walked along the piers and had lunch in a waterfront cafe. They celebrate Melbourne Cup day in Auckland too, and there were many women parading around in low cut dresses and fancy hats.

We walked up Queen Street (the main shopping street) and branched off at Karangahape Road for a look at some of the work on "spaghetti junction". (Paul was involved in the planning of the upgrade work). K Road is very salubrious with a number of tattoo studios, strip clubs and porno shops, so after a quick look at the work in progress we headed back to the nicer part of town. We were surprised by the very large number of Asian shops and cafés, especially at the top end of town.

One of the new feaures of Auckland is the Britomart, a very smart new transport hub. The railway station is underground, but this is the only underground part of the system - the trains are all fairly old diesel railcars. We discovered that there is a train line to the vicinity of our hotel, bought a ticket and were soon on our way. Arriving at the Greenlane station we looked around - and saw the hotel less than a hundred metres away! Why had we bothered with a taxi in the morning? Mental note to chastise the receptionist!

We were still feeling pretty jet-lagged, so we had another rest then watched the Melbourne Cup on TV, following which we had a pleasant walk around the race-course which is adjacent to the hotel. Dinner in the hotel restaurant (pricy, but very good) and an early night.