New Zealand – Day 1
The flight from Sydney was only about 4 hours – a short one by Aussie travel standards. And the first sight of New Zealand was actually just before touchdown – they aren’t kidding when they say this is the land of the long white cloud!
The hotel is on a wharf near the Maritime Museum and offers a great view over Auckland
The ferry berth, Auckland New Zealand
The view the other way is into the Bay of Islands – and you quickly see why this nation has more boats per head of population than anywhere else on earth! The scenery is breathtaking.
Near the Maritime Museum there are several tall ships moored. This one is the Søren Larsen – the boat that starred in The Onedin Line and is a brigantine rigged vessel displacing 300 tonnes. It is 145 feet in length and 25 feet across the beam. And the masts soar to 98 feet providing 6750 feet of sail area. This is an impressive ship that has completed many world tours. And it conducts regular cruises under sail to the heart of the Pacific Islands.
The Søren Larsen
The next few posts are a few days behind, as the wifi provider in the hotel did not support Windows ppc (pocket windows used on my iPaq PDA). This is the first country I’ve found so far that has not been able to provide internet service to my PDA – so on the next visit to NZ it might just be worth taking a laptop – there was cable internet to the room, and I was assured that I was the very first person unable to connect a wifi device to their service. To their credit, the hotel did refund the price of the card, despite my having scratched open the access code. Moreover, they allowed access to their business centre to enable me to check email. However their machines did not have card readers. Now if only I had brought the portable CD burner, I might have been able to achieve a workaround, and maintained the blog while I was away.
And so to dinner on the evening of the first day – there’s a great Japanese sushi bar on Queens Street in Auckland New Zealand.
Cheers
Jerry
