BK's Counties Motor Lodge Auckland

... more men and woman than any other commonwealth country. The exhibit about volcanoes was really great but we had to leave. Maybe there will be an eruption while we're here - you don't know. Mike enjoyed the Sir Edmund Hillary movie. Also we are staying only blocks from the main sports stadium where the All Blacks play. So Mike is pretty excited about that.

We saw some incredibly beautiful ...

... bunji. One of the girls had a bunjy booked for the weekend but they said if she did it right there and then she would get a second jump free. Well after seeing her doing that and working ut it would cost me £40 for two jumps i was straight in there and another girl followed. It was insane, not the highest bungy in the world but at 40m over the river it was a good starting points. On the first jump I was ******** myself, standing right on the edge and waiting for a ...

... the Link bus system and ended up downtown in Auckland - getting to grips with the geography including the harbour and Queens Street. The weather was pretty foul, really cold and lots of rain so we ended up giving up on the boats in the harbour, much to Dan's disgust and ended up going for coffee :-) We will return when the weather improves :-)

... Brian had to drive the car around for him. Pretty funny. Turns out, he is from Texas and his Dad went to the University of Iowa. He said he trusted us and so had the car checked out by a mechanic on-site.

As we thought, there were some problems so we lowered our price quite and bit and Eric still wanted to think about it for a couple days. But we didn't have the time so we gave him a Willbond special offer...and he ...

... working when I wanted to leave in a month anyway, and so I went down to the travel agents to book my onward tickets. And so I decided to head down to Christchurch whilst waiting for my visa applications to come through. But I just had time for a Christmas dinner at Easter. Apparently its a traditional ex-pat thing to have a Christmas dinner in the Southern Hemisphere's Winter when its colder, as Xmas in the Summer just isn't the same. I certainly wasn ...

... and these three guys were trying to corner it with nets to get it off the premises. Jesus! Australia is full of these buggers. Luckily we have seen nothing serious, so quite happy and with crossed fingers we have left the accident-prone OZ behind us and moved on to safe NZ. Anyway, back to Auckland. Today we met up with Jon & Robyn, my parents' friends, who took us for a drive to one of the great lookout points in Auckland, a vulcano with ...

We returned to Auckland fairly late so we decided to grab some dinner at the Asian food court again and then get some sleep. Tomorrow we were leaving New Zealand, and it seemed like it had flown by. With more time, we would have easily filled it with some more fantastic ...

... es Salaam.  I had promised a little girl back home to being her a t-shirt with Kilimanjaro on the front.  We found the perfect one in the "duty free" store.  Because we were getting ready to leave the country, we had limited cash left. Pooling our remaining Tanzanian shillings and US funds (the preferred cash in Tanzania -- they always seem rather disappointed when you pay in the local currency), we paid for the shirt.  Our fight was called shortly thereafter.  We boarded ...