28th March - Auckland 37°S 175°E, GMT+12, day 240

Our plane lands just before midnight and we are booked into a cheap hotel near the airport for the first night. The hotel is a tiny bit grim and so we decide to go upmarket for our remaining days in Auckland (one of them is our anniversary after all).

We pick up our camper van the next morning. Not so much a van - more a people carrier, actually a Japanese import Toyota Previa converted into a mini camper van for small people. Seeing it in the flesh the online description seems a bit optimistic, especially the bed width. It’s as cheap to hire as a car though so it’s not a bad deal even if we just use it for emergency camping.

We can’t check into our new hotel until later so we look around a museum first. The War Memorial Museum is built on one of the dozens of extinct volcanoes that pepper Auckland. This is our second museum in two days and shows the dramatically different experience of Maoris compared to Australian aborigines. We see a Maori Cultural Experience at the museum which gives a quick run through of Maori song and dance and ends with the Haka. The young Maori performers are having a great time and not taking the whole thing too seriously which makes for an enjoyable half hour.

We visit the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere - this being NZ you can go around the outside on a narrow walkway (around the widest bit of the tower in the photo) or hurl yourself from the tower as the mood takes you.

The next day we head to Devonport on the ferry. A gun emplacement on North Head has a ‘disappearing gun’ which pops up, fires a shell and then drops down again. It apparently took a lot of trouble to install when there were worries about being invaded by Russia (everyone needs to worry about something) and was only fired once when it broke so many windows that they agreed not to test it again.

The 27th was our anniversary and we go for a good meal in a veggie restaurant courtesy of Phil’s parents.

On the morning we leave Auckland we drop in to Ballistic Tattoo to get the Southern Cross tattooed on our arms as a memento of the trip. Karen has fancied having a tattoo for a long time, longer than Phil certainly. We’ve gone for the design used on the Australian flag with four bright stars plus one dim one, rather than the NZ flag version which only has the four bright stars. According to Phil it’s less painful (but more permanent) than having your back hair removed by threading. The tattoo shop is very modern and clean and the same one, we think, where Dawn and Jennifer got their tattoos after their last ever French & Saunders performance.

New Zealand so far has been similar to Australia, the main difference that we’ve noticed in the accent is the short vowels the Kiwis use so yes is pronounced yis and gap is pronounced gep.