Day 1 - Fri 12 Oct

Woke up, final packing, and dropped Fluffy at the vets for boarding on the way to the airport. Welcome aboard Air Canada .. err .. Qantas flight 119 from Sydney to Auckland. Seems that our Qantas flight was being operated (plane, flight crew, cabin crew) all by Air Canada under contract, so QF could use more of their planes domestically to cover Ansett routes. Of course, we paid for the flight with American Airlines miles, just to make it even more confusing! Got us to NZ though.

Landed in Auckland and caught a shuttle bus to the Bavaria B&B, in the suburb of Mount Eden. It's a nice place .. nothing particularly charming about it, but clean, functional and nice people. They have quite a fig tree growing in the common lounge room. We checked in, then realised that we'd never organised travel / health insurance for this trip, so proceeded to waste the next couple of hours phoning all sorts of people trying to get that organised.

Of course our regular health fund won't cover it once we've left. Assorted other difficulties from other places. We eventually gave up and went in search of food. Food turned out to be very easy to find, in a great array of prices, styles and flavours. We caught the bus as far as Karangahape Road (commonly known for obvious reasons as "K Road"). K Road has many restaurants and cafe's, but also appears to be a centre for the sex trade with many XXX stores, strip clubs and brothels. I guess it's the Kings Cross of Auckland, but we were way too early to see it at its best (or worse).

From there we turned into Ponsonby Road, which is more like a Balmain-type area. A great variety of really nice restaurants and bars, and good views of the city and the Sky Tower. Had really good gourmet pizza (Emu and Duck) at One Red Dog.

The bus ride home is where we find our first adventure for this trip. But aren't the adventures what makes a trip memorable? Any case, it started out find with us finding the right bus stop, and hopping on the right bus. The problem lies in the fact that we didn't know the name of the cross street where we should get off. And the bus drivers here are speed demons -- every one. I guess they get paid by how many times they get around the circuit in their shift, or something like that. So we hurled down Dominion St without recognising any of the landmarks I'd been so careful to note earlier. [ Yes, yes .. Travelling 101: You should always carry the address of where you're staying .. I guess we were distracted by our lack of insurance .. good thing we didn't get run down by the bus]. The driver was starting to look at us strangely .. our confusion was evident. So we decided to start back the opposite direction. The bus driver confirmed that we were now in the $2.40 fare zone, long past our $1.20 fare on the way in. So we started walking back ... and kept walking ... luckily it was a lovely night for it. About 25 minutes later, still walking, a bus pulls up beside us. It was our same bus driver, now off duty and back to check up on us. What a nice fellow! Hail to the bus driver!! We hopped back on board and drove back slowly, and soon spotted our intersection with no problems. We thanked our driver profusely and walked up the side street feeling very embarrassed.