Category Archives: Photography

On To Hobbiton

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Sunday 15 February 2026 – Our eventual destination for the day was Rotorua, well-known for being smelly and overrun by seas of boiling mud. On my previous trip to New Zealand, way back in 1988, the boiling mud thing was just about all I knew about Rotorua (and, let’s face it, the whole of the North Island, being, as I was, vastly ignorant about almost everything back then), so I found some boiling mud and judged the expedition a success before heading back to Auckland. This time we’d be staying in Rotorua for a couple of days so were fairly sure that another dose of boiling mud would be easy to find. En route, though, we had an appointment with a place which I had more than a nagging suspicion was going to be naff but which Jane absolutely insisted be on our schedule – the Hobbiton Movie Set, near Matamata. Jane is well versed in all things Hobbit-y and Middle Earth-y, having read and, as far as I can tell, memorised JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We had a booked entry time of 10.40, and John (of Kiwi Dundee) had warned us that we’d better make sure we were on time, as he said the place is pretty fully booked most of the time. Given that we had a three-hour journey, that dictated a brisk start to the day, so an 0600 alarm reminded us that we were travelling, not having a holiday, OK? The journey was uneventful, leading us past some more great scenery on the bottom end of the Coromandel Peninsula

before entering the large plain that lies to the south of the peninsula, which is really very flat indeed.

Being flat, it lends itself to dairy farming, and we saw huge numbers of cattle grazing on fields beside the road as we went. The Hobbiton Movie Set is clearly a Big Deal, as signposts to it start some way out. As one gets closer, the wording on the signs is, I think, a bit enigmatic.

Do they farm tourists on the movie set? Breed them and then set them free to roam the world on vast great cruise liners so that snobs can tut about tourism ruining all the nice places?

We arrived in good time, and were actually offered an entry time ten minutes earlier than our booking, which we accepted. I’m glad we did because it meant we ended up with a guide around the site who did an excellent job.

The Hobbiton Movie Set is not like the Harry Potter site near Watford in the UK. There, one can wander at will; on the Hobbiton set, one is shepherded from place to place as a group, with a guide giving talks at various places around the set; one is strongly discouraged from independent wandering. This goes against the grain for me, but actually, since groups arrive with guides every ten minutes, there really is value in going round with the group. as the information dispensed is very interesting.

The group is shepherded on to a bus to take people from the entry and car parks to the set.

There is a welcome video shown on the bus to give some context to what’s going on, and it’s at this point that one begins to get an insight into the scale of the operation. A bit of history:

The set was originally built in the 1990s for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. It is located within a large farm, owned by one Ian Alexander, and was found by a location searcher on a flight over it; it has many of the right characteristics – undulating hills, a lake and so forth – for creating Hobbiton in The Shire for the relatively small amount of time that it would figure in the original trilogy. It was built according to typical movie set rules, i.e. largely faked. The filming was done in about three months and the set broken down and returned to farmland. The story gets more interesting when Peter Jackson, the producer of the Rings films, decided to make a trilogy of films based on Tolkien’s prequel, The Hobbit, some twenty years later. He returned to the Alexanders and between them they decided to make something that was a film set first and foremost, but particularly could then be used as a visitor attraction. A lot more care was put into building the Hobbit holes and associated buildings and the whole thing was put together with a great deal of attention to detail and longevity.

The Hobbiton Movie Set, then, is a 125-acre plot within a 12,50 acre farm – so about 1% of the total area. Small as that percentage is, it still makes the Hobbiton set the largest movie set in the world. It’s clear, from the entry and coach ride over, that there is a vast amount of sheep farming going on.

and one gets the very first glimpse of the set on the bus ride over.

We then got the initial briefing from Rob, our guide (amazingly enough, originally from Guildford, a few miles from where we live in the UK – and he had lived in Knaphill which is the next village to Chobham! Small world…).

He gave us some preliminary information and made it clear that we were expected to stay with the group. Most people in the group had seen the Rings films and quite a few had seen the Hobbit trilogy; but apparently some 40% of visitors have not seen the films – but still they come.

There’s the formal entry point, with its inevitable focus for group photos

and then we got our first view over the film set.

Rob then led us on a route around the place, stopping to give us lots of background information about the creation of the set, and some of the things they had to get up to to make it look lifelike, such as false perspectives to underline the difference in size between four-foot high hobbits and 7-foot high wizards. To be a hobbit extra in the film one only had to be no more than of 5′ 6″ tall and have curly hair; apparently a lot of local farmers suited these criteria.

The tour round offers a view of more hobbit holes than one can shake a stick at; some are built to different scales to aid the false perspective mentioned above

and the main one was, of course, Bag End, where Bilbo Baggins lived, at the highest point of the set.

One could see that a lot of care and attention had been paid to detail and, where possible, to what Tolkien’s vision was for the village to add verisimilitude to the scenes,

even to the extent of ensuring that nasturtiums were growing outside Bag End, as described in the books.

A lot of thought had been put into planting a variety of flower species, some from middle England, where Tolkien lived, and some natives from New Zealand to give the place a sense of being otherworldly. Where clothes hung on lines, these had been put up and taken down every day so that paths were worn through the grass to make it look realistic.

The huge tree above Bag End was the subject of another interesting story from Rob.

It’s an oak tree. For the Rings films, a real, live oak tree was chopped down and erected there,. which in itself must have been a huge endeavour.  But it was propped up there without roots, and so by the time of the Hobbit films it was dead. So it was replaced by an entirely artificial tree – scaffolding poles and other materials make up the trunk and branches. At first, it had 370,000 artificial silk leaves attached to the branches. This was fine up to the point where there was a hiatus in the filming through Peter Jackson’s illness.  When they resumed, sunshine had discoloured the leaves. How to deal with this? Employ four art students, who hand-painted each leaf a different colour each side! The leaves we see today are different – there are only 200,000 of them and they are made out of some kind of polymer. But what an astonishing approach to take to getting verisimilitude.

Another staggering example was how they got Ian Holm (the original older Bilbo Baggins in the Rings films) into the films, as he couldn’t travel to New Zealand. So a replica set for the inside of Bag End that had been created in Wellington was transported over to Pinewood Studios in the UK in its entirety for the filming and then transported all the way back to Wellington.  Now that all filming is finished, it is apparently in Peter Jackson’s home as a guest suite.

Most of the hobbit holes (including Bag End on the site) consisted of frontage only, but two had been set up with complete interiors so that visitors could actually walk through and see what a “real” hobbit hole looked like inside. Jane went through one

and I went through the other.

Standing at the highest point of the set, outside Bag End, one could get a sense of just how the set fits into the vast surrounding farmland;

and could also get a view of the lake, with the mill and the Green Dragon pub,

and that was the last destination on the tour,

where Rob served his group with free drinks

in the pubs beautifully set-up interior.

Outside, beside the bridge

the mill had a moving water wheel

and one could sit outside and look back over the movie set towards Bag End.

We were then bussed back to the entry point where it only took us about a quarter of an hour to find the car among the car parks.  It really is quite an operation: every ten minutes a tour group of 40 guests goes round the set – that must be over 2,000 people a day, and it’s busy every day. My low expectations turned out to be wrong. OK, I still found it endlessly enraging that people consider a scene to be acceptable only if it includes them in it, which makes my photographer soul die a little every time I see it; but I found the whole thing really interesting, and quite heartwarming to see the care and attention that had been paid to making it as good an experience for as many people as possible.

We completed our journey to Rotorua past more great views and a sense of some incoming weather.

At one point we drove through a torrential rain storm, which, it seemed, followed us into Rotorua – we watched the rain lashing down as we settled in to our accommodation.  Our hotel was the Millennium Hotel, which seems very posh. Mind you, our room wasn’t ready when we got there, despite it being after official check-in time (but they gave us free coffee whilst we waited) and there’s a rather complicated relationship between the fridge in our room and the cabinet into which it just fails to fit. But there is a kettle, and a hot tub outside on a little deck for Jane, and seems very comfortable.

We have a couple of full days in Rotorua and a few Things To Get Up To. Stay tuned, and you’ll find out all about it!

Auckland – Ambling, Art and Architecture

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Wednesday 11 February 2026 – The internet is a great and good thing and even social media has its good side, despite what The Mainstream Media would have one believe. Having said in public (i.e. this blog and Facebook) that I wasn’t sure what we’d get up to today – our last day in Auckland – given that the city, whilst a pleasant place, hasn’t got a huge list of must-see items, I was deluged with suggestions. Well, a couple of friends piped up, anyway. Waiheke Island was one of the suggestions, and indeed we had considered this. It’s well known as a wine destination, and a decade ago, the words “ferret” and “trouser leg” would have sprung to mind. However, neither Jane nor I drink wine these days, so that isn’t a particular draw any more. There are all sorts of other exciting things to do there, like ziplining, but somehow these weren’t much of a draw either.  Another suggestion was the Tiritiri Matangi Island Nature Reserve, which had actually been on our original idea list until Jane spoke to them and they pointed out that it would be overrun with a conference and school trips today. We also had a recommendation for the Antarctic Adventure at Kelly Tarlton’s, but we’ve actually been to Antarctica, so weren’t sure how much we’d enjoy that. And among all this cogitation, Jane had discovered that there’s an area to the south of the city, based around Karangahape Road, which features street art, something we’re both interested in seeing.  So, that was what we decided we’d do.

However, despite eye-rolling from Jane, I insisted on adding another destination to our ambling around, because I’d been cleaning my teeth with a handraulic toothbrush for the last two days and really wasn’t happy about that, so wanted to find yet another store that might stock what I wanted. Pathetic, I know, but I really thought that finding a Sonicare toothbrush head for sale in a major city shouldn’t be a problem. It turns out that it is. Rather like my brother in search of a mobile phone SIM on one of his travels, I have been mildly obsessed with trying various establishments that might stock such a thing. Without success, as it turns out. So, reluctantly, after today’s abortive excursion to Warehouse Central, I capitulated to fate and bought a cheapo battery toothbrush that I hope will do a satisfactory job. En route there and back, we passed the former Auckland Civic Administration Building

which has now been developed into apartments, but which still has on its side the rather handsome Auckland coat of arms*

featuring Kiwis Rampant.

Our shopping done, we could head to Karangahape Road and start fossicking about looking for the various bits of street art on display.  Our route took us through Myers park, a pleasant and quiet green space

which has an attractive play area for the kiddies

and a statue of Moses for the grown-ups.

As we approached the exit of the park we came across the first piece of street art.

and soon emerged into an area where a lot of work had been done with a lot of spray cans.

The passageway shown in the last photo above was extravagantly decorated all the way up the steps

and led to an arcade, called St. Kevin’s Arcade. No, really. It even has it own website. It’s a colourful space

and debouches on to Karangahape Road, which, it quickly becomes clear, is a very hippy area.

We pottered up the road a bit and looked into the Symonds Street Cemetery, because Jane has a bit of a thing for cemeteries. It’s a substantial one, with, as one might hope, an air of calm about it.

The cemetery is split into various areas

with the Jewish section being the nearest to Karangahape Road.

There’s an installation in the nearby Pigeon Park

which is called Karangahape Rocks; I suppose you’d expect that a hippy area rocks, wouldn’t you?

We kept going for a bit, crossing over the motorway via a bridge so that we could see one picture that takes up the side of a building

and probably looked a lot more impressive before the trees grew up to obscure it. And then we were off on the trail along Karangahape Road and some side streets in search of various bits of art. We found quite a lot of it. And we also noticed some really rather attractive architecture as well. Auckland is a relatively junior city, having been founded only in 1840, and there have been waves of architectural styles sweeping across it in the last 20 years; many of them can be seen in this area.

So here are a couple of galleries, one of the art we saw and the other of the architecture, colonial, deco and modern, that is sprinkled around the place.

First, the art:

Then, the architecture.

Pretty much the final thing we saw was an advertisement as well as a piece of street art. The advertisement was for AT – Auckland Transport, and was a long mural.

As you can see, the mural is of a train, with a variety of fanciful passengers shown in the windows, with doors periodically along it. What marked it out was that two of the doors occasionally (and prompted by what, I don’t know) actually opened!

So, well done to AT for exploiting the zeitgeist of the area with imagination and humour.

It was a happy couple of hours wandering around seeking out and photographing these scenes. As well as the visual impact, we also, of course, experienced an area of the city that is radically different from the somewhat effete downtown and waterfront areas. The Karangahape Road is more scruffy, more raffish and more colourful, and it was very interesting to have walked around it. It was quite a ramble!

 

We relaxed for a short while back at our hotel before heading once more towards the waterfront in search of sustenance.  We found it in the shape of Dr. Rudi’s Rooftop Brewing Co. Booking was not possible but we managed to find a shady space on the terrace and we were allowed an hour there before a private function took over the space. Dr. Rudi’s offers a modern dining experience – QR codes to view menus, order and pay. The website was split into various sections: food, wine, cocktails, etc. And the cocktails section was, one might say, Rudi mentary – it had the glaring omission of a simple G&T. How modern is that, eh?  Jane was able to order her Hugo Spritz OK, but I had to go to the bar to ask for my arcane and, I might add, expensive specialty drink to be prepared, which took a while.  The food was good and tasty, but I can report that they have an odd idea of what shape a pizza should be and also of what actually constitutes chorizo. Nonetheless, we were well fed up and were able to exit gracefully just as they were about to clear the area, and tottered back to the hotel to begin our preparations to depart on the morrow.

Auckland has been a splendid introduction, to the country and to being back on the road. We’ve had a couple of days to work our way into the feel of the place and to get over our jet lag. Tomorrow, we pick up a hire car and head off into the wilds of the Coromandel Peninsula. Stay tuned to find out how that all went, won’t you?

* Auckland’s coat of arms was adopted in 1911. Its arms consist of a cornucopia (‘horn of plenty’), reflecting the wealth of the land; a pick and shovel, symbols of mining in the region; and a sailing ship, showing the city’s close relationship with the sea. The closed visor in the crest represents Auckland City’s status as a corporation and the flowering plant is native flax. The supporters are kiwis (the national bird), and the motto is ‘Advance’.  https://teara.govt.nz/en

Arrival to Auckland

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Tuesday 10 February 2026 – In many ways it’s nice to have a late start to one’s travels. No early morning stuffing last-minute items into suitcases, no fretting about non-appearance of taxis to the airport, plenty of time to complete the admin of leaving the house in an orderly fashion, with the heating turned down, the lights turned off, the fridge having been run down to a satisfactory minimum.

Great in theory. In practice it means at least an hour sitting and waiting for the taxi with a feeling of slight agitation as you think up last-minute things to worry about. And specifically in my case, the relaxed start delivered a small but telling life lesson which is this: why not have a spare electric toothbrush head permanently resident in your sponge bag, eh? That would mean you wouldn’t forget to bring one because your relaxed departure resulted in slightly too much complacency about having packed the essentials, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

Something of a first-world problem, I realise, but to me the new things one should learn through travelling should be wider cultural issues than discovering how difficult it is to clean one’s teeth with a conventional toothbrush.

Anyhoo.

All the other aspects of the journey to get to New Zealand went very smoothly. The Emirates service was overall superb, and it’s not their fault that it takes 23 hours in the air to get halfway round the globe. As I suspected, I found it quite difficult to find anything among the over 6,500 items on offer as part of their in-flight entertainment that I really wanted to watch. However, I spotted on one screen that there was coverage planned of the T20 World Cup matches.

That’s cricket, in case you need your cultural horizons widened. I searched among their various offerings, but couldn’t find a reference to it anywhere, but spotted someone else watching it and eventually worked out that it was a live broadcast channel. So I was actually able to watch England play cricket in India as I sat in an aeroplane halfway between Dubai and Auckland. Truly, technology is a thing to marvel at.

This is the following match, by the way – Ireland v Sri Lanka

England almost managed to lose their match against Nepal, but won after a thrilling last-over finish. Sam Curran, you are The Man.

Sorry, got carried away there. The rest of the journey was very fine, with lovely food, attentive service and an almost complete lack of sleep for me, but we arrived in good enough order at the Auckland City Hotel, which is not particularly ritzy, but offered us a perfectly decent room which, though unremarkable in most aspects, was outstanding in one.

Check out the tea bags at bottom left. There were big mugs provided, too!

The rooms may be conventional, but the public areas of the hotel are quite funky in their decor,

and it’s located quite near the downtown area. So, having checked in at around 1pm, we went for a walk. Obviously.

Our main objective was to get down to the waterfront where it was a reasonable bet that there would be a good variety of eateries. En route, we passed an impressive-looking church, St. Matthews-in-the-City,

so we looked in.

It’s not a hugely ornate interior, but there’s some decent stained glass, including some lovely modern work.

We pressed on down to the waterfront, which has a pleasant, gentrified air about it,

and found The Conservatory,

which served us a very nice meal, full of tangy Asian-fusion tastes and too large by the amount of one portion of sweet potato fries, the ordering of which was entirely my idea and the source of much regret that we couldn’t do it justice. Afterwards, being stuffed full, it was good to have a reasonable distance to walk back to the hotel, to try to settle what was a lovely but excessive meal. The walk back gave us a chance to see some of the architectural variety on view in Auckland. The city isn’t what I would call a hugely attractive place, but there are some corners where the older buildings have survived the tide of modern steel and glass.

The Ferry Building is an attractive edifice

as is Waitemata train station.

Some of the modern buildings are quite interesting, too.

Thus ended the day, as we found ourselves comprehensively tuckered out when we got back to the hotel. We had enough energy to brew some tea and that was it before we turned in for the night.

Although I was completely knackered – I was within a toucher of collapsing face down on my keyboard as I attempted to edit up some of the photos from the day – I expected that jet lag would prevent me from having a good night’s sleep; my normal experience (particularly when travelling eastwards across time zones) is that I sleep until around 4am and then wake up, completely alert and ready for a day’s activity that isn’t going to start for several hours yet. Last night, however, was not thus plagued. I suffered no major periods of wakefulness, but it was clear from looking at my Garmin Body Battery, a reliable guide to my general state of wellness, that jet lag was going to take its toll for at least another day.

We had paid for a hotel breakfast in advance, which turned out not to have been the best decision; the charitable description of what’s on offer would be “adequate”. But it was sustenance for another day, and so accordingly we set out to discover what further treats Auckland had in store for us.

It has to be said that there’s not a huge amount to see or do in Auckland city. The waterfront that we’d wandered round yesterday is very pleasant, and indeed all of the downtown area is decent enough; but there’s not a huge list of Things To See And Do for the visiting tourist. One thing stands out, literally and figuratively: the Sky Tower.

This was a rather startling demonstration to me of the power of false memory. I have visited Auckland once before, in 1988, and I would have been prepared to swear under oath that I had been up the Sky Tower when I was here last. Since it wasn’t actually opened until 1997, that was patently not the case, and I can’t imagine why I’d thought it was; perhaps I’d just seen photos and conflated it with my experiences of going up similar towers in, for example, Sydney and Toronto. Anyway, having bought tickets online, we blundered about until we found the entrance, and the friendly staff there, in their very striking and colourfully-designed jackets, showed us to the lifts that took us up to the various observation decks on offer. The view is, unsurprisingly, pretty good from up there,

and it’s interesting to see various of the city’s buildings from on high.

St. Matthews-in-the-City
Town Hall
War Museum

It’s possible to bungee jump from high up on the building. We didn’t do that, but, as we sat enjoying a cup of coffee, we also saw that it was possible to walk around the outside.

We didn’t do that, either. I mean, it’s not as if you’re going to get a better view from out there than you can from in here; and you have to get kitted out with jump suits and they won’t let you take your own photos, and so it’s not a prospect that interests me at all. But it was interesting to see others doing it, and there was another cabaret turn going on as well;

the wooden boarding round the building was getting some kind of spray treatment. There was a mystery object, too.

There were supporting stanchions at intervals all around the building, and all of them had an area where a bracket could be bolted on; mysteriously, some of these brackets were missing, but in all cases there was evidence of recent work to excavate a smooth but inexplicable indent in the wood surrounding them. Answers on a postcard, please….

After our sojourn at the Sky Tower, we headed back down towards the waterfront area to take a look at the one other item of interest that Jane had unearthed – the Maritime Museum. This took us past the cathedral, St. Patrick’s. We looked in.

Unusually for a Catholic Church, it’s not sumptuously appointed, but there’s once again some lovely stained glass

but there was an Adoration going on, which meant that I got told off for taking photos, which had the potential to be a distraction for the people there having their spiritual moment. I have to say that in all the Catholic churches I’ve visited – and there have been a few – I have never come across the Adoration before as a formal ritual, so my ignorance rather let me down, I fear. I apologised, of course, but left shortly afterwards, feeling a bit embarrassed.

We made our way to the Maritime Museum and headed for the ticket desk. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but given the fact that New Zealand is made up of islands, one could reasonably hope for an interesting wander round. In the event, serendipity and Jane’s observation skills added a component to the day that was unusual, enjoyable and informative. But first we went into the galleries of the museum. The first area was dedicated to the indigenous history of oceangoing, which was quite considerable and far-ranging.

This being an area unfamiliar beyond having watched both Moana films, there was a lot of interesting content about traditional boat building and sailing. Among the many things I learned from this section of the museum were: the fact that the outrigger of sailing canoes was always to windward (I had previously thought it was to leeward to prevent capsize, but no: it’s there to sit on to provide counter weight to the force of the wind); the fact that outriggers could be sailed in either direction (an outrigger boat with a lateen sail can only go in one direction in any given wind and I wondered what happened if this wasn’t the direction one wanted to go in; the answer is that the yard, from which the lateen sail is hung, can be unshipped from one end of the boat and resettled at the other).

The outrigger sailboat, with lateen sail suspended from a yard

Where the yard meets the deck, it is lashed into a receiving socket. There’s one at the other end of the boat for sailing the other tack

The other, somewhat startling, thing I learned was that there is a tradition of shark-calling. Practitioners could summon a shark by singing a particular melody and thrashing the water with a special shark-calling apparatus made of coconut shells.

This combination would tempt a shark to the surface where it could be captured and eventually killed and eaten. Crikey!

The serendipitous aspect of the museum visit was a short harbour cruise on a sail boat, actually under sail – much more interesting than siting on a boring old motor vessel! The boat in question was the Ted Ashby,

a gaff-rigged ketch, a deck scow, built in Auckland in 1993, a replica of one of the region’s original scow fleet from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (A scow is a flat-bottomed work boat or barge for transporting non-perishable freight.) It was built and named in honour of, surprise, Ted Ashby, a scowman and author who was involved with these and similar boats for most of his adult life. About 20 people at a time can go on board for a one-hour cruise out into the harbour and back. It was a good day for this (not raining, not too windy) and we got some great views of the city skyline and the harbour bridge as we went.

A yacht race was ongoing as we sailed around

The thing that marked the cruise out, apart from the chance to chat with the crew and understand a bit of the history of these boats, was the opportunity for people to help out with the hauling and lowering of the sails.

This replica had an engine, but the boats were originally sail-only and they died out because of the invention and adoption of the internal combustion engine. Nothing to do with putting engines on boats – it was because these engines enabled swift land transport, so the need for the working scows disappeared.

The cruise was a very engaging and interesting way of getting a different view of the city, and once we got back we took a look at the third component of the museum, which was called “Blue Water, Black Magic“, the story of the innovative design, meticulous teamwork and outstanding leadership which led to New Zealand’s international prominence and success in, particularly, the America’s Cup. As well as a huge variety of the smaller dinghies and yachts in New Zealand’s history of sailing, the museum has a couple of the America’s Cup boats which have won them such renown. This is NZL32, the 1995 America’s Cup winner.

Outside the museum is KZ1,

called the Big Boat (no, really?) and a contender for the Cup in 1988. As is common with that particular race, results were often settled in the courtroom rather than on the water, and that year was the subject of a huge amount of litigation about the rules governing the eligibility of boats. These days, there’s much tighter control and less variation between individual boats, but the practical upshot of 1988 was that this Big Boat, the fastest monohull in the world at the time, was comprehensively thrashed by the American entry, which was a catamaran. Any fule kno that a catamaran is vastly quicker than a monohull of comparable size, so there was actually little point in the race taking place at all. Privately, I think that the yanks were so pissed off with losing the 1983 Cup (the first time that America had not won it, despite massive massaging of the rules in their favour) that the 1988 litigation was always likely to end up in an American victory despite what common sense and moral values suggest.

The museum has a replica of the America’s Cup in it, and, tellingly, near it a replica of this replica, made out of plastic from sea-borne rubbish.

After the museum it was time for a late lunch, and Jane had lighted upon an establishment with the unlikely name of Hello Beasty.

It’s another Asian-fusion establishment, and the food was terrific – really tasty and tangy. And they had softshell crabs, so Jane was in heaven. This was an excellent end to a day that turned out to be much more interesting and varied than I had expected.

I’m not quite sure what Auckland has to offer for our second and final day here. Jane has, as ever, been on the lookout for Things To Do, and I guess I’ll find out what they are in due course; I will surely keep you informed.