New Zealand is so similar to England. If you think Aus and England are similar - come here!!! From the smaller streets and accompanying traffic, to the multi-cultured atmostphere Auckland would fit erally well into England. It has it's fair share of parks and interesting places too, some of which we've visited over the last couple of days.

After a lie-in we decided to venture into the City - in our campervan. This was a mistake as there were no (or at least very few) car-parks which weren't multi-storey. eventually we found some on-street parking for a couple of hours. The city skyline is dominated by Skytower which rises some 328m - more about that later.

After passing some time just wandering around we visited Cash Converters (this is becoming a habit) and bought the cheapest second-hand telly they had and a CD player - we managed to get both for about 70 quid! Then onwards and upwards to Mount Eden where a short drive took you nearly 200m up the side of a steep (dormant) volcanic crater. The views from the top were excellent, although we didn't manage to trek to the centre of the crater as the weather closed in just as we were about to start the heading down. Following a bit of a drive we ended up on the East side of the city (past millionaire's row) at Kelly Tarlton's Antactic Explorer. Kelly died just a few weeks after the construction of the centre in 1985, aged 47, and despite trying I couldn't find out how he died. It seems such a young age for a fit and healty guy - maybe it was caused by the stress of building this huge centre, which was excellent by the way! Aside from an unremarkable aquarium (not another I hear you cry - that's at least 4 now...) it houses an exact replica of Scott's Antarctic base from the 1910-12 expedition and also an Antarctic area where you get to ride on a snow-cat through real snow and see penguins in their (semi) natural environment. There's also a cool little cutaway section where you can see them swimming. It was so good we went around twice! Just time to catch a coulpe of pictures of the sunset before heading back for a food shop.

Today has been a really great day. The first place we visited was the marina and the Auckland visitor's centre. We saw a couple of the America's Cup yachts and also discovered that the weather for tomorrow, our planned day on a boat visiting the islands, is predicted to be 'wet, with gale force winds'. This forced us into a re-think, and we are (semi) reluctantly heading north tomorrow up towards the Poor Knights Islands. We continued on tot he War Memorial Museum of Auckland which looks a bit like a Greek temple - made that way as many of the returning soldiers were stationed in the Med during WW I (would they want to have been reminded of the war though...?) There is currently a fantastic exhibition on the Peruvian tribal culture, based mainly upon the value of gold and ritual killings. At the start of the exhibition was a painted jug from around 2,000 years ago. All the further exhibits formed a part of the stories on that jug and slowly pieced the story together. It has really whetted our appetite for Peru and the Inca trail. The Museum also housed countless other exhibits on Maori culture and WWs I and II to name just a couple.

We decided to walk back into the city (about 3km) and went via a huge park (Auckland Domain) the university that houses a fantastic clocktower. Our last port of call was to be the Skytower and we duly went as high as we could (about 2/3 of the way up) and enjoyed some great views of the city. Downstairs is a casino and we put a token bet on a roulette table - Jen made the call (red) and it, rather predictably came up...BLACK...should have known really in the land of the All Blacks and all that.

Tomorrow we're going to start heading north for some diving and then it's back down to Rotorua and the thermal spas before some 'black water' rafting among the glo-worms in the Waitomo Caves.