Auckland, New Zealand

1/28/2006

Today was Auckland. We were supposed to get here at about 8:30 AM. We were close. 3:00 PM. The story is, they had to go slow in the slightly rough seas or some old fart might be in discomfort. What a lot of crap. I have been in ships that went as fast as they could, in rough seas, so as to be in port on time. Some of them could have been mistaken for sea going barf factories. What a bunch of cry babies.

They finally cleared the ship at 3:30 PM. We had a free tour from Virtuoso and they are usually fantastic. This one was cut to a third of it’s planned time.

We got into three deluxe buses and they drove us around town for a short time. Auckland is beautiful. It’s a city of three or four million. It is built on an isthmus only ten miles wide. There are many earth quakes as it is built on a fault line. It is the cleanest and best kept city I have since Hamilton Bermuda. Much of the city is built on filled in land and is hilly. The locals we did run into were quite friendly.

After a short ride we ended up at a small inn and restaurant that was built in the 1920s. It was owned and being run by the daughter of the original owner. This place had won first place as the top small inn in New Zealand and the restaurant took first place as the finest in the country for both food and service. We had just eaten at about 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM so we really needed another lunch. We sat outside under a fancy tent in a flower garden. The owners and help were the nicest people you could have ever seen. The food was so good that we did eat it even though we were already full.

We were walking around the grounds when we finished. I spotted the owners car. I knew it was the owners because it had the name of the restaurant on the front license plate. (Mollies) How observant of me. It was a short BMW 745i. It was exactly the same as the ones back home except some dummy had put the steering wheel and pedals on the wrong side. I bet you he had one big discount for that mistake.

We then got back into the busses for a further short tour of the town. The driver did keep driving on the wrong side of the road. We were taken to the top of the tallest mountain in the area. It was a park. You could see both coasts from up there as well as the tops of the tallest buildings downtown. They just stopped for a minute for us to take pictures from inside the bus. There was no time to get out. From there we traveled a different route back to the ship. All were nice as could be and kept thanking us.

As we got off the bus there were gifts for everyone from the tour company that Virtuoso hired. I don’t know why. They were just non descript pens.

We had to walk through security, customs and immigration once inside the terminal building. It was nothing like at home. Everyone was so nice and friendly and helpful it was almost fun. We all really liked this place.

Kiwi Sherm out.

(Posted on behalf of Sherman Rootberg)