Came across this one – part of a gypsy travelling mob; we met the rest next day.

It looks good, better than the white plastic ones like we’re in. Handcrafted, and tidily fitted out inside.

The lady with the dog who seemed, as you may expect, in tune with the infinite, wished us a good journey.

These leaves falling from the old trees above, settled on the concrete when it was wet, and their patterns were preserved.

It was closed when I arrived  – too late to use anything but the basic facilities. Tradesmans entrance, as it were.

However Sally reported next day that you could sit down for as long as you liked for only 50c and it smelled nice.

And so on to Cambridge, via the tortuous freeways of Auckland – helped considerably by the bloke in the GPS.  Missed Hamilton.  Through some very fertile cattle country, then horse country.  Pretty well off area, but Cambridge didn’t seem at all pretentious – unlike some of the towns up north which were all money and show.

Here’s a way to spend a lot of money.

This massive yacht was being fitted out on the dockside. The mast alone was worth half a million.  All carbon fibre and diamond studded rivets.

Very impressive, but, as they say, too big for chooks, too small for cows.

Haven’t seen anything on this scale since the States.
This huge area was pretty well all boats.

About 12 pontoons in a large bay, surrounded by (depressingly similar) apartment blocks. Endless boats, many boatbuilders and boat shops.

Stretch’s cousin had their boat here – a 45ft Westerly, beautifully appointed. Allen is a top notch boatbuilder to some seriously expensive boats so you can imagine the quality of the fitout. Whew.

Their yacht is in the foreground of this picture.

The marina stretches back to the buildings in the distance one way, and much further in the other direction.  Gasp.

Now this we didn’t expect at all, and is one of the nice things about doodling along with no particular itinerary. We stopped to get a coffee and an unprepossing roadside place, main features being portraits of log trucks on the wall and a smell of cooking fat. And at the back what looked like the usual arts and crafts crap shop.

The coffee was delightful, the homemade meat pies crusty and tasty. while waiting for the food I wandered into the crappy art shop.

Which it turned out was full of some amazing sculptures, huge carvings of 50,000 year old swamp kauri and rimu, inset with resin and stones. At the back was the workshop, which the sculptor was happy for me to look at, then, at the back of that an extensive yard filled with massive trunks – and machinery waiting to turn the trees into sculpting blocks. The guy was an ex-businessman who gave up 16 years ago to carve wood, and seemed very happy doing it. Most of the work was valued at $20,000 and above, and most of it was monumental.  He didn’t want pictures, so I didn’t take any of his work.

He said he was coming to Tasmania next year sometime to pick up serpentine from a mine, might see us then.

Sink with water vs mouse.

LD50 (mouse) = 1

Went for a walk with Stretch and Anne, and left the camera on the rail in the carpark. Drove back an hour later after suitable panic to find it gone. Depression sets in, since I like that camera and use it all the time. Insurance forms, looking for camera bargains – not much change from $800 to replace. Prospect of traipsing round the Auckland stores tomorrow.

Rang parks to see if anyone found it – bugger all chance I’d say, so goodbye camera. Police rang a few minutes later – someone had found it, called in at the copshop to pick it up, rang the bloke, many thanks.

Nice to know there are honest people – and I wonder where else in the world this would happen, a busy carpark in a tourist area? So I thanked the bloke and said I’d give him $50 as reward, but how to get it to him? Don’t worry he said, leave it at the Subway cafe on the road, they know me, any of the staff. So we went there – the staff didn’t know him from a bar of soap, but took the $50 anyway. It got delivered when he next went in for a bite. How about that?

Camped in a big site, right next to the beach.  Started out with a lot of squeaky kids dressed as boy scouts, then became empty apart from 2 other scattered campers. Nice.

A certain twittering attended the scrying of these wee black blobs. Don’t get it myself, but clearly harmless fun.

This, which looks like another one of those art installations, is actually a military thing. Interestingly its an observation station for degaussing checks in the harbour. The ships in the war which had been degaussed had to steam between 4 buoys and take compass measurements. Navy dudes sat in here and watched them.

So from Whangerei on south, via Auckland to Taupo, Rotorua and the mountains.

We knew stretch and joanne were going to be in NZ and gave them our mobile.
By chance we were driving along the freeway when they rang from the harbour next door, so we hove to for a day. Walked and talked, saw the boat. Good time.

Found this little gem, not surprising given the number of yachties tooling around.

Sally looked at it with a somewhat jaundiced eye, and I had to admit that it was going to be hard to get a lot of the stuff into the luggage for the flight home.

Still, I did manage to pick up a handy bit of rope.

A few installations scattered about the foreshore. Here are a couple.

Some were nice enough but a bit wacko-the-diddle-o if you ask me

Very boaty place, Whangerei – as is most of the E coast of North Island.
Here’s a junk rigged boat.

I don’t know what this one is about – looks like a Wharram cat with folding masts

And finally here’s a concrete war canoe being launched through a heap of stones

This one rocks back to open the river to boats.

This one is for foot traffic

Our first impression of Whangerei was of a bit of a seedy run down place – certainly is in the city centre. However, there’s a lot more to it as we discovered when we went up the lookout. It’s a big deep river with a huge harbour and lots of industry. The boatbuilding industry is pretty strong, and yachties can get most things fixed here.

The cone mountains in the background are cinder cones from extinct volcanoes.

John is the son of one of Don Hildred’s wartime spitfire pilot comrades, Bill. They formed a lifelong friendship – as did most of the pilots – from the second world war. Both are now dead, but Katie and I visited Bill when we were here 10 years ago, and Sally and I visited John and Anne this time. They took a run-down farmhouse sitting on an empty hillside 35 years ago and restored it to what it is now, a lovely place with an attractive garden. Everything in the garden was oriented toward self-sufficiency, and for many years they have managed to live off the produce of their 2 acres. And excellent produce it is. We had tasty exotic fruits, fresh vegetables and juice, and lamb roast, all off the property.

Nice to see them again.

As well as leatherwork inside of the house was devoted to bookmaking. The process was recreated using the original 170 year old presses (which were second hand when bought in France).

The type is set in blocks, and fixed on the press. Some of the pages were pre-cast. The type was rolled with ink, then pressed onto the paper. The ink of the day took 2 days to dry, so the process was slow – several double pages being printed on large sheets.

Pompallier wanted the books to be easily avaliable, so the practice of issuing books with folded edges to be cut by the reader was not used. The pages were pre-cut with a special plane, sewed together, and glued to the end-leathers (with glue made from hooves and horns).

Finally the back was glued on and the book pressed to finish it.

All of which took a considerable amount of labour and time. All done apparently by 3 men over the years, one of whom was the head printer – actually a teacher who had a cousin who was a printer and got appointed to the NZ job in France on the strength of that. And the fact that nobody else wanted it.

I found the patina on these old machines, and the beauty of the wooden implements
 fascinating.

Since I have had a lot to do with leather crafts, particularly shoemaking, I was fascinated to see the leather making process still in operation at Pompallier. Now the leather is made by some retired engineers, but originally it was made into leather for the military – in fact the main income for the business was the military contract. After Pompallier left the house was bought and the leather business continued under a new owner. This was highly profitable until the seat of government shifted from the bay of Islands to Auckland. As politicians will, they killed off the business in the Bay and forced it to go to Auckland by imposing large docking fees and punitive taxes on goods brought in elsewhere.

The process of leathermaking in the traditional way is long and timeconsuming – I hadn’t realised just how long until I saw it done here.

First the leather is soaked in vats of urine (takes a long time to fill these, so they say)

Then the hair is scraped off, and the fat and meat from the underside. The oils in the skin are also removed.

The hide is then soaked in vegetable dye – here they usea acacia bark, presoaked for months in water, in increasing strengths of solution. It takes a long time – 3-6 months for a lamb hide, up to 2 years for cattle. The hide is turned and inspected every week. Finally it is hung out to dry.

The dry hides are then worked with tallow, made by rendering the fats of animals. This is a labour intensive process involving flattening the leather, rubbing blocks on the hide to soften the fibres. The hide is also worked over a blunt knife.

Finally the hide is ‘skived’ where a sharp knife thins the hide down by cutting off the soft underskin – the suede. The skiving process is highly skilled, because at this stage a wrong move with the knife will destroy a hide that has taken many months to prepare. The origin of the colloquial use for the word ‘skive’ as lazy (‘skiving off’) comes from here – the workers doing the hard work softening the hides saw the ‘skivers’ cutting suede, a physically easy process, and ‘skivers’ became a pejorative term.

When the military moved the leather business became marginal, and finally a landslide buried the soaking vats at the back of the property and the owner shut down the works, and died soon after.

About 15 years ago when the house was being renovated these vats were rediscovered.  The hides in them had been soaking in tannin and dye for 150 years, and yet was perfectly good when made into leather.

Apparently when this press came by ship they didn’t know there was no jetty to unload it. So they waited for a high tide, got a longboat ready with strong rowers and rowed ashore as fast as they could before it sank the boat.

I loved the craftsmanship of the machinery, the patina of age, and the way the light fell on its parts.

While Russell was largely tourist oriented, we did find one remarkable building at the end of the beach which kept us occupied for the afternoon with its fascinating history.  The building was the original house, the internal fittings had been reconstructed back to the mid 1800’s using where possible original equipment.

The story is that of the introduction of the Catholic religion into the Western Pacific.  At the time there was no Catholicism preached in the islands, and the establishment of a British colony in New Zealand was seen by the Catholics as a useful base for spreading the word – or at least their version of it.

By 1842 the Protestants and Methodists had established themselves on the mainland and were spreading the word – or their version of it – among the Maori. Who were pretty sophisticated, and understood the value of learning. Many of the kids went to school, did homework, and were learning to speak English.

Russell was a hotbed of vice. Into which Bishop Pompallier came from France, intending to establish the headquarters of the Catholic Mission for the whole of the Western Pacific.

Well, as we all know the French are nothing but trouble. And the Catholics teach vile popery in their misguided worshop of the Lord. So the Protestants and the Methodists got themselves into a right conniption-fit about the arrival of the good Bishop. They wrote a tract denouncing Catholicism and the Bishop as the Arrival of the Antichrist, which they published and distributed among their flock. The British administration also send an urgent letter back to parliament  in England notifying them of the invasion of the French, and opining that this was likely the thin end of the wedge, that soon they would all be eating baguettes and speaking French in NZ.  Accordingly the Brits decided forthwith to get on with making the treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris – something they had been dragging their feet about in true bureaucratic fashion.  After all who knows what Les Frogettes would do next.

So the treaty was signed, with the interference of Bishop P, who insisted on inserting a clause to the effect that all men were free to pursue their religion and customs in NZ (not something the Brits had thought of). Even today (the day before yesterday to be exact) they are arguing about what the treaty means. The Maoris have recently had a commission into the wording and decided that it was extremely unlikely they would have given away control of pretty well all of their lands to the Brits as part of the treaty. And they have a point, they were, after all, not crude savages at the time. The present government has not accepted that. They say why wouldn’t the Brits of yesteryear take over the whole thing – they did it everywhere else.  No surprises there.

Anyway, Pompallier established this house and set up a printing press of his own to distribute the Catholic word according to the Pope. He had the smarts to print it all in Maori language, thus making it accessible to potential customers. All the printing materials, ink, paper, thread etc came from Europe by ship. Plus the metal to make the lettering – which incidentally was a precious metal of military significance since it could be melted down to make musket shot. During the years this house was operating as a press they make 38,000 books, all free, all in Maori language. A pretty impressive achievement.

Not that it was all fun for the workers. Those in the house had to work all daylight hours, little rest, lots of prayer, simple uncomfortable garments. They weren’t happy with this, but since it was all for the glory of God, what could they do.

The house is build of rammed earth, and the original formers are preserved for display. The walls show the pegs used to support the formers as they were moved higher with each layer of earth.

After some years Pompallier was sent elsewhere, eventually returning to France where he died in a paupers grave. Before he left Russell he donated the printing presses to the Maoris – they were eventually given back to the Pompallier house in the ’60s by the Queen of the Maoris.  His bones were disinterred and buried in a proper grave.

Of rather greater interest than what’s on offer on the Russell seafront are these trees (Metrosideros excelsa).  Known as a chiefly tree, they were used for hammers and beaters, and as the knees in ships. They grow very slowly, have hard, dense strong  wood, and beautiful red orange flowers.  And, the Maoris say, if they bloom early it’s going to be a good summer.  And they have aerial roots, are able to survive drought, grow in precarious situations like cliffs.  It has also been introduced into SE Australia, South Africa, Spain, and California where it is in some places considered a weed because of the damage it does to drainpipes.

However it succumbs to possums, which eat the leaves.

Nice to see they’re looking after the blokes here. Last time I saw this was in Paris, albeit with much fancier 19th century wrought iron surrounds. Still, its a start.

We boarded the Happy Ferry and went across to Russel, once known as Kororareka, the ‘hellhole of the Pacific’, filled with pirates, deserters, prostitutes, gamblers and other n’er-do-wells.  Well today it’s filled with cafes, tourist shops, tour operators and other pickpockets.  Which is a bit of an improvement on the original, since the houses have been rebuilt in a more genteel fashion since the place was shelled and levelled by the British Navy in 1845 (and good riddance you may say).

Seeing little to interest us except Sally’s eponymous cafe,

we had a coffee and read the guide book.  Which came up trumps with a suggested visit to Bishop Pompallier’s house, at the end of the street.  Where we spent the rest of the afternoon in a most fascinating place.

I think this is pretty cool.

The Bay of Islands has a central place in NZ early history.  It is a superbly sheltered bay with many anchorages, and was where the treaty of Waitangi was signed.  It was the seat of government for a while.

Nowadays it is renowned for its tourist trade.  The unfortunate thing about tourists (and this, of course, excludes us), is that they generate an environment which obliterates the environment they have come to see.  So it is with Paihia – the bay itself is beautiful, but its beauty depends on a quiet, homogenous, natural visual environment.  Which is in direct contrast to the carefully crafted environment of the commercialised tourist trap.  Here every sign is designed to be eye catching, every billboard to offer something for sale.

The simple fact is that nature cannot compete with the visual environment in which it is sold.  Even the Grand Canyon, or Milford Sound is diminished – and less imposing places obliterated – by the commercial barrage attendant upon tourism.  To me, that often makes these places worthless to see, and pointless to visit.

And so it is with Paihia and the Bay – perhaps once a beautiful little seaside town with an exquisite beach and a lovely view across the Bay to impressive cliffs and intriguing anchorages, now it is a busy, restless, clamouring, visually noisy road filled with pretty well everything it originally was not.  Pity.

Way back in the day – early 1920’s, when the empire builders in SE Asia retired, some wanted to settle at KeriKeri. Apparently this wasn’t so easy because their wives had been used to several servants. They said if they weren’t going to have servants in NZ (and nobody wanted to be their servants) then they needed electricity to do the work instead. If they didn’t get that, then they weren’t going to move. Hmph.

So the blokes got together and had a power station built. They tapped into the KeriKeri river, diverted part of the flow through some iron pipes to a power house (about the size of your average garage), and installed an overhead Pelton wheel attached to a generator. And ran cables to the houses of the wives in question.

All 17 of them.

This is what it looked like in its heyday:

And this is what it looks like now:
Apparently it worked good and everyone was happy.

As it was:

Now:

KeriKeri, the nearest town, is a clean, prosperous little place. Unpretentious, neither super rich, super touristy, nor poor. Apparently becoming very popular with retirees. Including us – we reckon if we’d landed here instead of Tasmania 40 years ago we would probably have stayed.

It’s got a walk along the river up to Rainbow Falls, which took us 3 hours. Interesting forest sights.

Is a Mercedes diesel automatic/selectable. Ex-Britz motorhome bought by Kiwimotorhomes, a husband and wife outfit who only have 3 vans.

One of the disadvantages of hiring a flash vehicle from one of the big firms is that they charge you for everything – tables, chairs, bicycles etc etc. And they have have punitive insurance rates, punitive deposit – some of them take $5,000 or more off you to start with (effectively getting an interest free loan), and you have to return the van with everything full, they scrutinise it for dings etc etc. The result being you’re always worrying about the vehicle. And the service you get is hardly personal.

By contrast Nick, the owner, doesn’t take any money off – just swipes the bankcard for $1,500. Only cares if the fuel tank is full on return, gave us bikes, mobile phone, table, chairs, gas, water and doesn’t insist on having it cleaned. Nice guy – delivered it to our accommodation and will take it away at the end. And about $1,000 cheaper than the rest.

It’s not a new vehicle, but it works, everything is there, and clean, and we don’t have to worry about it – we can go on dirt roads if we like: just use your common sense was the instruction.

Nice.

Inside is a handy layout – a table/bed at the end, another table opposite the door gives us plenty of sitting space. You can walk right through to the cab. Kitchen in the middle. Toilet/shower/basin too. An upstairs bedroom was abandoned after too many elbows and arguments by day 3. Useful storage area though.

Despite the squally weather we’ve had a lot of sunshine, and, after all, this sort of climate is what we’re used to. A big advantage of coming now is that the campsites are largely empty and we can get the good spots.

is what’s written above the door of this seedy run-down movie theater. No longer a showplace, it sums up the impression we got of Kawakawa.

The drive from Te Ahai to Ahora Island on the Bay of Islands is interesting, passing through rolling hills and by attractive beaches – all much like Tasmania. The towns get a bit poorer north of Whangerei, which in itself is a working class town.

Nevertheless the Bay of Islands is another piece of remarkable NZ coastline with many bays and islands. We avoided the main centre of Russel and Pahai and went to a small island off a peninsula maintained by a group of volunteers. Very relaxed, friendly, right on the beach. Sally found it looking through the numerous guide books we have onboard.

The weather is starting to crack up, and we are now parked right at the end of the campsite next to the water with the wind and rain coming in squalls across the bay. Nice and cosy – gives us a good feeling to be inside in this weather.

Sally reads to local rag in the rain

I bought a large kite at Pauls fishing kites, and today there was enough wind to try it out. It flew well, but could do with a tail to stabilise it.

Also tried out a new camera – a Jaycar cheapie but still good enough. No timelapse unfortunately but 30fps video gives me the ability to extract snapshots.

Parked our van with a full on view of the surfing spot, and were entertained by a display of some pretty good performers.

The second day we were driving north and decided not to waste the day, so took a road to the coast and found this free campsite at Te Arai. Long beach, surfers and a couple of vans. Beautiful spot.

You don’t see these often.

I wonder what this guy is all about. He’s not being nice about it anyway.

Makes you think of government spooks, terrorists, hippie nuts, fundamental christians, vegetarians, aliens, survivalists or maybe just a grumpy old man.

Very tempting to drive (or perhaps walk would be better) down and see what all the fuss is about, but what with the tyre spikes, dogs, and maybe never getting out again we decided to give it a miss.

With our mind boggling we paused only to take a photo.

The area around Snells beach comprises spectacular scenery – as does most of NZ. The country round here has rolling hills, distant mountains and sheltered bays.

Like a lot of the country the population is deceiving – it looks rural, but there are quite large collections of houses in the valleys. Here we came across big box stores and large early age schools, and you can only get that where there are a lot of people to fill them.

Hereabouts a million dollars buys you a nice place with a view of the sea. Anything waterfront and you pay a whole lot more.

Warkworth, the local town, tries to retain its aura of yesteryear with slightly old looking cafes and shops, but a fair smattering of smart dress shops, the Beemers and Audis parked on the streets, and 5 real estate agents within 100m tells a different story. After all, in a flash car you can practically commute to Auckland from here.

So off we went north out of Auckland. With a lively conversation going on – between the GPS on the windscreen, Sally in the passenger seat, and the the roadsigns, I navigated the van through the city with an acceptable level of shouting.

After a couple of hours we decided to stop at a convenient site and sort ourselves out, and found Scandrett beyond Snells beach. An old farm built in 1885 right on the seashore. Beautiful place, kept by the council, spotlessly clean and with only one other van.

Nice place to start.

There was an exhibition called ‘light show’ with the usual art-wank installations that show (and I quote) “how light works have facilitated the transition from object to environment in expanding experiences of space and vision”.  Yeah, right.

To illustrate one such:

This, called ‘untitled’ (for goodness sake!) is made up of a lot of fluorescent tubes in a diamond pattern.  So what, you may say?  Well, folks, it ain’t just a load of tubes, it’s….

“While the cross-hatching and chevron motifs created from the lights may appear as Western minimalism, for Jones they refer to the traditional Aboriginal concerns of country and community – their designs being based upon the carved patterning of Koori (south-eastern Aboriginal) shields and the markings on possum-skin cloaks.”

… a load of baloney.

I just don’t get this sort of thing.  It seems to me that these artists have a singular lack of imagination and/or ability and try to hide behind pretentious words to infer that what they have done has some significance.  Some of the art in the gallery was good, clever and interesting.  But there was a lot of the ‘untitled’ genre.

Personally I prefer representational art of three hundred years ago:

The building was impressive – all marble and wood, nice lines

The floor was polished marble with fossil sections – lovely to walk on:

Trendy it may be – mainly restaurants and clothes shops.  But these caught my eye.

Ponsonby is the happening place to be in Auckland, and we’ve got a nice little place in the back of someones garden just off the main road.  Clean, well appointed and the same price, but far better than, a hotel room.  Very pleased with it, couldn’t be better for the first 2 days in the city before heading off.

We didn’t actually get to go round the Museum, largely because we were moderately pooped by the time it hove into view, and in any case it was half an hour before closing time.

Nevertheless, pausing for a bit of rest in the entry hall, we did marvel at the main structure, an apparently suspended inverted wooden bell and a remarkable staircase.

With interesting lighting from a rooftop skylight.

Generally I like the architecture of Auckland.  No shortage of ugly box architecture of course, but enough of this sort of creativity to make it an interesting city.

Here’s one of the ugly ones:

En route from the museum to the bus stop we came across this plant house – with non-tropical and hot-environment plants.  Delightful environment with lovingly tended plants.

Inside one of the greenhouses was a lilly pond

And hanging above the water was a pitcher plant, looking slightly sinister.

Tucked away in Onehunga is Paul’s fishing shop.  Which happens to sell kites for line fishing – you send up a kite which pulls your fishing line out to sea.  kite fishing has been part of NZ fishing techniques for a long time – an offshoot of kontiki fishing which is the same thing using a small raft.

These kites have become popular with kite photographers all over the world because of their quality and versatility.  I’ve got one of their kites (a Nighthawk, of which they sell about 1,000 a year), and was determined to visit the shop when in Auckland.  Rather like a Catholic going to the Vatican.

We had an interesting time there – Sally, a kitemaker extraordinaire for kites taken to Mawson’s Huts in Antarctica in 2009 for very successful kite photographs – talked with the lady who sews the kites and got a few tips.  One of which includes getting an industrial sewing machine for our various heavy duty sewing needs.

The kites are made to exact patterns – the care is needed because a few mm difference one side to the other can make a kite fly crooked.  The stitching needs to be careful and exact, and the spars need to be matched.

Very impressive and educational – I bought a large lightwind kite of which more later.

The central station and its surrounds in Auckland is called Britomart. Not, as you may reasonably suppose, an English supermarket, but a district. It was called after Fort Britomart, which was named after HMS Britomart, the navy ship that did the first survey of the harbour in 1841, way before they had supermarkets.  Actually it was the third HMAS Britomart – there were 7 in all, starting in 1805 and the last being a minesweeper sunk in 1944.

Of course that doesn’t explain why the Brits called a navy ship after a type of shop that was to be invented over 100 years later.  Actually they didn’t.  They named it after the Minoan goddess of Mountains and Hunting – Britomartis.  The Greeks followed the Minoans and associated Britomartis with a nymph (an oread to be exact).  The Cretans worshipped Britomartis as the ‘good virgin’.

Well not so good in the virgin department actually, since she had the demonic features of a Gorgon, held double edged axes and was surrounded by divine snakes (all of which goes a long way to explain why she’s still a virgin after 3,000 years) .  The dastardly Cretans just called her a good virgin to fool everyone into thinking she was a nice lady.  Just like a warship.

Obvious, yes?

Most of Britomart was underwater originally, and is reclaimed land, but now only the railway platforms are below sea level.

Which makes them really dark of course. However some clever use of reflected light has made the station platforms into a landscape of interesting contrasts. The ceiling has a few holes (the Romans would have called them Oculi) whereby the sun shines onto suspended reflective spheres. The walls have spotlights trained on the spheres. The result being a lot of direct and indirect lighting.

In addition to the roof lighting the bollards along the platforms, as well as most of the supporting pillars, are made of shiny steel, thus collecting and reflecting all incident light.

The result is diffused light, very pleasant, in what would otherwise be a dingy basement.

Add to this the trains being electric rather than diesel, and the carriages spotless, and you have an enjoyable train experience.

Which, in our case, included learning from a Maori cyclist that Sally was called ‘whaea’, which means ‘honoured Grandma’.  Sally liked the honoured bit.

Sal and I take a break and drive around North Island with no particular itinerary nor time constraints. Been a pretty busy year, and we could do with a break. Just arrived in Auckland, stayhing in a lovely AirBNB place in Ponsonby, looking forward to tomorrow.
Inflight entertainment – Virgin wifi on my iPad mini and Bose noise cancelling earbuds.  Way to go.

Decent breakfast after the pitiful Virgin offering. The packet at the top is my sushi lunch for the Air NZ flight. In the good old days they fed you on airplanes. Not any more.

Gandalfs own aeroplane. Gosh.

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