More hassles with Australian public transport added a few more grey hairs to Marks developing 'salt n' pepper' look... the 'Sunbus' airport transfer we were supposed to catch never appeared and we were left to catch the next one which only gave us 45 minutes to check in.

We flew to Sydney and then spent a delightful night in Sydney International Airport (which closes at 10pm - hardly International!) before catching our connecting flight to New Zealand. Notable is our conversation with the jolly and welcoming Information Centre guy... conversation transcript as follows:

Kim: "Hi, I wonder if..."

Info Guy (interrupting): "No I can't give you any information - I should have gone home an hour ago"

Kim: "Is there anyone else we could ask about ..."

Info Guy (interrupting): "No - no-one!"

Kim: "Please can you just tell us if there is anywhere more comfy we can sit overnight - we've just flown in and have an early flight and..."

Info Guy (interrupting): "No we're trying to discourage that...thats why we've replaced all the seating in the airport with uncomfortable chairs with arms so people can't stretch out and sleep"

Oh Joy! What a lovely night! We should mention that all the overnighters were later corralled into one area of the airport right next to the door to the cleaners area and the cleaners spent all night joyriding their cleaning machines - ramming them into doors and setting the alarms off repeatedly and probably on purpose!

Anyway Christchurch was a lovely town, very English... but we didn't see a lot of it as we were so knackered from our night in Sydney Airport!