Boxing Day in Auckland

For two people who had managed about 3 hours sleep between them over the last 24 hours, sleep proved amazingly elusive.  A few hours of fit-full sleep and I was up in time to catch the dawn.

View from our room

After breakfast, we took a walk along the water front and then down Queen Street which is the main shopping street.  I managed to visit only two camera shops before it was time to head for the ferry to Devonport.

Devonport sits over the water from the main town of Auckland, and is the original home of The New Zealand Navy and is full of lovely clapper-board houses from the 1800s.  We took the tour which was run by a local driver and we were the only two people on it  to begin with as he drove us round the sites occasionally picking up someone he had dropped off previously.  He took us up to the top of Mount Victoria (an extinct volcano - mind you every hill is an extinct volcano round here), where you get some lovely views back towards the city.

View from Mount Victoria

These lovely read trees only flower over Christmas.  The Kiwis call them their Christmas trees

After the tour, we made our way along the sea front to a lovely restaurant that did some rather pleasant food.  Then back along for a sit in the sun under the banyan tress by the local library.  Although the local library was shut it had left it's free wifi on and I made full advantage of it to update our blog.
Then it was back across the ferry for a light ale by viaduct harbour, then back to the hotel for a sleep.  OK it was only 4pm but we were still jet lagged, so a couple of hours kip was in order.

Back on the ferry

Up again at 8pm, we popped out to get something to eat and found another restaurant that was empty except for ourselves but did some slapp up scran.  Even though I went for the salad I can't help feeling I might come back from this holiday an ounce or two overweight.

After that it was back to bed, in an attempt to match our body clocks to the local clock.  All in all a fairly laid back day as we ease ourselves in to the NZ life.