No breakfast appeared this morning & as we had to be in Auckland by 9.30 we hopped on a bus & ate at Brown's instead. We duly arrived at the pier for the cruise, only to be told that it was cancelled as the boat was stranded out in the harbour! Not a good start to the day! However, all was not lost as we were able to re-book for the 1.30pm sailing, and of course were given another set of free ferry tickets to Devonport! Well, we now had a few spare hours ...

It was worth $3 each to catch the bus to the Harbour where we wandered around in the sunshine & admired all the super yachts. We liked the idea of a trip round the harbour so tried to get on a cruise for the afternoon, but had to book one for the following morning as they were already full. As everyone knows, I love a bargain so I was really pleased that with the cruise tickets came free return ferry rides across to Devonport. A ferry was just leaving so we ...

Am I pleased to be in New Zealand! Once we'd picked up our car we set off for Newmarket, a suburb of Auckland, to find our motel. We managed to get slightly lost but as we could only get our satnav to speak in Japanese we had to resort to good old map reading to get us there! A lovely Japanese speaking lad (sense a theme here?) showed us to our unit, then we went for a walk into Newmarket. This is a typical suburban shopping area, complete with mini Westfield Ma...