One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

I'm currently sitting in a nice little motel in the southern suburbs of Auckland. Yesterday we flew over in a doglegged journey from Melbourne to Brisbane to Auckland. Pacific Blue (the airline) told us to arrive two hours before the flight, which meant (ugh) Unfortunately, this info was wildly inaccurate. queen_nephthys and I decided not to go to sleep at all the night before which meant that we were both pretty tired by the time we finally got on the plane for the 6 am flight to Brissie.

At Brisbane we had to take a train to the international terminal where a conga line of a few hundred people snaked to the customs desks. Once past that we got to the good part: duty free. I got myself a purely medicinal bottle of Amaretto Disarrono, queen_nephthys ended up with some half sized bottles of Baileys and Bacardi and we picked up a USB thumb drive for queen_nephthys's father Peter. The coffee at Brisbane airport is shit. They grind the beans way too early for the brew to be aromatic. Grumble. (Pause to fill a shotglass with Amaretto at 7.30 AM...mmmm) The flight found us both getting increasingly tired but we'd forgotten neck pillows so sleeping was a little problematic. Customs in NZ was a simple process, which is always welcomed when your eyelids weigh two kilos each and are filled with sand. While we waited for the shuttle bus to take us to the car rental place, I quickly got queen_nephthys her mandatory first-time-in-a-country fix of McDonalds. The burgers are better than in Australia, apparently.

Picked up the car, some kind of mitsubishi sedan with a licence plate starting with CRL, so we've named it Cyril. After some dramas, caused by tiredness and the kamikazi attacks of Auckland motorists., we got to the hotel, changed, showered and decided to blow the budget on a nice meal in the city. Took the bus in, and found the Minus 5 bar for a drinkie. The Minus 5 bar is a bar made entirely out of ice. They give you a thick coat, gloves and mittens and in our case because we paid the deluxe price, a Russian fur hat which we get to keep. Inside, the lighting is pink and blue LEDs, and the bar, shelving, seating, walls and sculptures are all ice. We ordered our cocktails (I recommend Blue Steel, which has vodka, blue curacao and other nice stuff in it.) The drinks come in glasses made of ice and the seating is covered in deer-hides to keep the water off your bum. (It's still cold to sit on.) Much photographing took place and we had a lot of fun holding drinks in both hands and carefully placing them back down on the nonslip mats to avoid them skidding across the smooth ice of the bar, but after about fifteen minutes, I was getting chilly, so we left. Of course, my glasses froze over as soon as we went out, but that was part of the fun. The night was cold and windy, so we took shelter in a bistro near Britomart Transport Centre and ate a good meal (I had seafood chowder followed by a footlong cumberland sausage with cheddar potato mash, bacon gravy and sauerkraut. Yum.) By then it was 7.45 and I could feel that it was definitely time to crash. Waves of fatigue were crashing over me, so we bused back to the hotel (the bus dropped us exactly on the driveway to the motel) and ten minutes later, I was in bed and unconscious. Ten and a half hours later, it's a new day, we are heading back into town and tomorrow, we drive off to the bay of islands for a cruise.

Okay, now we're sitting in the Belgian Beer Cafe in Vulcan Lane, Auckland where I have just finished a gigantic pot of green lipped mussels with coriander and lemon. Yummmmmmmmm. Dark belgian beer on the side. Today, queen_nephthys and I headed for Kelly Tarleton's Undersea Adventure where we watched a guy hand feed stingrays. Unlike Steve Irwin, he survived the ordeal. There's a small glass barrier between the audience and the water with the rays in it, it's about waist high so every now and then a stingray will surface against the glass and blow water at nearby humans. A friendly tour bus driver gave us a free lift back to the city, and having heard good things about Vulcan Lane, we headed down here. After the Kelly Tarleton thing I had an inexplicable yen for seafood...

More later