NEW ZEALAND
27 SEPTEMBER TO 1 OCTOBER 2002

Weather: mostly cold, sometimes wet.

This was the first leg of our "world trip". We left Perth on 27 September and flew, via Sydney to Auckland. Our flight was delayed in Sydney for some 8 hours and we arrived in Auckland at approximately 4.00am on the morning of 28 September.

After a couple of hours snoozing we sourced a hire car for use over the next 3 days and took off around Auckland to see the sights.


At the time of our visit the America's Cup Challenge was almost underway so we spent some time looking around the boat sheds in the harbour at Auckland. These pictures (above and below) are of the boat sheds and pics taken from Skytower.

ON 29 September we booked out of our motel and headed north via the Skytower and Eden Hill.

After taking in the (freezing) sights from Eden Hill we headed north to the beautiful Bay of Islands. We stayed the night there and took in a game of golf at Waitangi. It was a bitterly cold day but we braved it and had a most enjoyable game (I must mention... I birdied one of the par 3s!!).

Here are some pics of the course.

We headed back to Auckland via the ferry and along Russell Road. It was an asbolutely spectacular drive back and we thoroughly enjoyed it. We arrived back in Auckland on 30 September just in time for peak hour traffic. Without a road map and no idea of where we were going we followed our noses until we found a motel where we stayed for the night.

On 1 October we took our hire car back and was able to get a courtesy bus from the hire car company to the airport, which wasn't far anyway.

Our Qantas jumbo left on time at 5.55pm that evening so we winged our way to Canada and our Rocky Mountaineer Adventure .