We’ve arrived, and to prove it, here’s a picture of the fountain shown in the satellite image below.

We arrived here in Auckland at about 7.00 am on Thursday, having left Heathrow at about 4.00 pm on Tuesday. By some mechanism that I still don’t understand we managed to lose Wednesday altogether. Unfortunately, on arrival we found that our brains were still in transit, but they are now beginning to arrive bit-by-bit and with any luck the process should be reasonably complete in the next day or two. To be serious, in fact we arrived in much better condition than I thought we would, the flights were on time and our seats were comfortable. The shuttle from the airport to Mission Bay worked as it should and we were at the Phillips’ home about two hours after landing.

The major formalities at Auckland airport were concerned with bio-hazards to agriculture and we had to present our walking boots for inspection and possible decontamination (not necessary in our case because we’d cleaned them well before packing). But imagine the scene, opening cases to find the boots and packing them again after examination, with us falling about from the effects of jet-lag.

Mission Bay is as pretty as everyone says it is, north-facing (which is good, in this part of the world) and very green. Oliver stopped here, just round the corner from where we are, and loved it too. We won’t go into the reason why it’s green, beyond mentioning that they don’t have hose-pipe bans down here. Yesterday, Sunday, we took the bus up to Auckland centre for a walk round, most of the shops were open and cafes and restaurants in the harbour area were doing good business. We had a very good and by English standards, very cheap, lunch in one of them. In fact, it has to be said that almost everything here costs less than at home and quite a lot less too, in many cases.

Today, Monday, we drove down to the big museum in Auckland, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which houses a remarkable collection of Polynesian and Maori art and artefacts and also has an interesting section on colonial Auckland, with lots more still to see. In amongst Cathy and Laurie’s collection of books is the Penguin History of New Zealand, which I’ve been reading in an attempt to start making good my woeful ignorance about this extraordinary country. Everyone here knows about what’s happening in England, for example, it makes front-page news, but we know so little about this country. This afternoon I had my usual stroll along the sea front trying to get a grip of the topography with the help of map, it’s beginning to make some sort of sense I think. This evening I think I’ll have to nip down to the local pub, it’s called De Fontein and it serves a range of Belgian beers. But wait, they couldn’t, they wouldn’t, serve it chilled, would they? Wait for the next riveting episode to find out.