We arrived into Auckland at lunchtime making ourselves at home in our last Top 10 before leaving in the suburb of Manukau. We drove to the local Westfield Shopping Centre to find that the fire alarm went off 10 seconds after we had entered the building, and a lengthy evacuation ensued. When the police turned up we made the executive decision that this had not been planned! Once allowed to re-enter we had a mad 45-minute dash to grab everything that we would need for the fastly approaching Fijian spell of our trip before the centre shut. That evening we packed up our possessions and cleaned our beloved Cleopatra, sad that our time had ended together.
The next morning we got a little disorientated in trying to find our drop off point- Auckland has a surprisingly large airport. After bidding our goodbyes, we left Cleopatra and hopped into a taxi to briefly sightsee central Auckland for the rest of the day. After popping into a few obligatory shops we stumbled upon Auckland library with free Internet, which we simply couldn't refuse! By the time we had made the most of this it was about 3 o'clock and our tummies were grumbling so we ate a surprisingly good meal in the library cafe. On our way to the Sky Tower, Jess stopped suddenly and became very wide-eyed as the realization that she had not seen her (new) camera in a while hit her. Therein began some frantic backtracking and telephoning the van rental and taxi company and Jess' evening continued in this manner to no avail. After helping Jess for a while, Armelle was summoned to the Sky Tower, while Jess ran around scouring the entire (or what felt like the entire city).
In returning to the library for the 3rd time, we explained the camera problem to a very kind lady who worked in the cafe, who seemed to make it her personal mission to find the camera, ringing the taxi and van rental companies yet again and taking Jess' email as the next day we were Fiji bound. No luck as yet but there is still a slither of hope! The New Zealand landscape made quite an impact on both of us, and we had a fantastic 4 weeks there. We could easily have stayed for a good while longer but this left all the more reason to return. We were both really glad to have rented Cleopatra the camper van because she gave us complete freedom and we were grateful for the lack of packing and unpacking we would have had to have done if we had been hostelling it. The weather had been very kind to us as we thought it being autumn and all, our activities would be hampered by rain. In fact, we got less than 3 days of rain the whole time there! Next stop, Fiji………………………
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