We took a shuttle bus from Auckland airport as recommend by one of the volunteer tour guides. As a treat we stayed in the Heritage Auckland. To me it felt much like an upper class ibis. Not entirely surprising as it is a chain. The staff are charming and very helpful but to my mind it lacked character. That is a very minor complaint however as there is much to recommend it. As soon as the staff there found out we were on our honeymoon, we were presented with a complimentary bottle of champagne. The breakfast is sumptuous! There is plenty choice for vegetarians. There are two types of breakfast. The cold buffet and the hot buffet, the cold buffet is a few dollars cheaper than the hot one. There is a gym of sorts on the top floor and if you are suffering from Jet lag, there is nothing like a swim at 6 o’clock in the morning to set you up for the day!
The heritage charge 25NZD for non-optional valet parking.
A clustered network of souvenir shops and eateries. The chief product of the souvenir shop in New Zealand is paua shell, of which the New Zealanders can feel justly proud. I have never seen such a beautiful shell before, and clearly the New Zealanders know this. The paua shell is clearly very versatile as the countless forms it can take attests to. About 90% of the jewellery in every souvenir shop we visited in New Zealand is paua shell based. This does have the slight disadvantage of saturation but at least you can be selective as there is a great deal of choice. There is one shop in there that is worth a mention, but sadly for all the wrong reasons. It is an ‘antique’s’ shop, though ‘antique’ could be used as a euphemism for ‘tat’. It is run by an Irishman, and I suppose we should have noticed the lack of people in his stall. Let’s just just as soon as he realised that we were tourists from Britain, we were trapped there for about an hour. Perhaps at any other time I would have been interested, but this is not a man to meet if you are still suffering from jet lag.
*Laugh*! You were too polite! (but then as I have discovered that jetlag symptoms for me include being really rather ill, I’d have been able to use that as an excuse to get away…)