Thursday 17th January. On to Auckland and last day in the Campervan

We were up fairly early because A, the lovely lady wife had to review a number of documents and B, the campervan need sorting and we had to repack everything into our cases. This took a considerable amount of time but we left the Hot Water Beach campsite not long after our planned departure time of 10:00. The usual beautiful scenery down the east Coromandel coast and then across a mountain range to join the main road to Auckland. We were booked to stay at the Novotel Auckland airport which is right next door to the International Terminal and apparently the hotel was built specially for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Our plan was to go to the hotel first, check in and leave our luggage before dropping off the campervan and heading into Auckland for a few hours. Navigating airports in a campervan is not the easiest and at one stage we found ourselves about to enter a car park with a height restriction less that the height of our van. Some wonderful reversing along the main airport approach extracted us from this minor problem.

However, we successfully checked into the hotel, campervan parked outside in a restricted area, and offloaded our luggage and drove off to leave the campervan at Maui just 10 mins away. We bade a sad farewell to FMD 744 and took a taxi into Auckland. Having consulted the Lonely Planet guide we had decided to do a walk that they recommended so asked the taxi driver to drop us off at St Kevin's Arcade for the start of the walk. This was our first evidence that southern hemisphere taxi drivers have not "done the knowledge" as those in London are required to do. Eventually he dropped us off somewhere close to the starting point and off we went. This was a real success and we walked through Myers Park, Albert Park, the grounds on the University and down to the waterfront getting an excellent perspective of the city.

The above photo of Ray is in Myers Park and the statue is a copy of Michaelangelo's Moses in Rome. The lovely lady wife said she was not sure which was which!

The section though the University was lovely and particularly Old Government House and its grounds which included a magnificent campsis.

We stopped for a quick glass of wine and beer on the waterfront before deciding where to eat

Amongst many places recommended we thought Food Alley sounded intriguing. This is a covered mall with several food stalls all offering individual asian food; from Korean to Indian, from Vietnamese to Turkish. We settled on Indian and had a really excellent meal for less than £14 all in. It reminded me of the indian food served at Anwar's in London just off the Tottenham Court Road where you can still get a "eat as much as you like" lunch on workdays for ~£7.

We enjoyed Auckland and would have liked to spend more time there but we had to get back to our hotel for a very early flight to Sydney. The city is truly cosmopolitan and there is clearly a very large population of people from south east asia who would seem to be doing very well there.