Auckland - day 56 - 2nd March

Now in Auckland with Trea, Grant and girls, sorry for the delay in updating the blog, computers and internet have been hard to find.

• At Picton the dive by Dave on the Lermatov went well and I looked after the girls whilst they had their hair done and arranged a fishing trip for the next day.
• Dave and I went fishing in Charlotte Sound on the TOA TAI (Sea Warrior) with Captain Colin and withing 10 minutes of dropping the line into 37 metres of water I was into what turned out to be a 6 foot conger eel. Whilst I was landing this Dave caught the first blue cod of the day, 2 up to the "Brits". The fishing was steady but never of any size and we moved twice to try and catch larger fish. Colin filleted all the keeper fish including the conger and we all took a number of pieces away. After 6 hours at sea we were thirsty and we called into Seumas's bar and as we had been there several times before they pan fried the fish and served with salad and chips - very tasty washed down with Guinness.
• Caught the ferry from Picton to Wellington, very smooth crossing and chatted to a couple of Canadians who we bumped into in Rotorua 5 days later, what a coincidence!
• We left the ferry at Wellington and drove straight to Whanganui for the one night on the way to New Plymouth and found our first pub selling real English ale, Speckled Hen, Boddingtons, Greene King Abbot, Tetleys and London Pride which we tried with some great steaks.
• New Plymouth, walked along their award winning boardwalk to see the Len Lye "Wind Wand" and around Pukekura Park which is a 50 acre botanical garden which contains a rain forrest and a 2000 year old Puriri tree. Don't know who was around to date this!
• Moved on to Waitomo Caves to see the "glow worms" and the Billy Black country show about how they cleared the outback for farming.
• At Rotarua we went to the Kuirau Park which is a free geo-thermal area with mud pools, hot water, smells but no geysers which gave a flavour of what we were going to see at Te Puia the next day on a much larger scale. We also went to see "Tribal Lights" a cultural theatre evening with a Kiwiana buffet. Would you believe that they put on the show and evening just for the four of us and what a time we had. It was a priverlage to share this experiance with people so dedicated to preserving the Maori culture, thanks for the experiance.
• We then moved onto Coromandel Town in the rain, not much going on here but we did struggle to find a restaurant. However we ended up with the best fish, gunyard and garlic chips ever and had our first Pau fritter.
• This left us the 198k drive along the beautiful west coast of the Coromandel Peninsula to Thames and then on to Auckland.