What a gorgeous afternoon in Taupo! I couldn’t resist stopping for coffee at Replete and spending a few minutes relaxing on the shores of Lake Taupo before getting back on the road to Auckland. Those with more time to spare were chilling out in the shade or swimming in the lake – lucky them!!

I drove up through New Zealand’s Central North Island on the way from Wellington to Auckland today, stopping off at the Army Museum in Waiouru to take some photos for posterity – the next time I pass by, this treasured national museum will have a brand-new name.

My man is travelling with me and we’re staying a night at Wrights by the Sea motel in Raumati on the Kapiti Coast (just north of Wellington). The next morning I’ve got a meeting, so what’s he going to do to entertain himself? In this part of the world, the answer is easy; Southward Car [...]

Sailboats dot the Waitemata Harbour in Auckland on a beautiful Sunday afternoon – but there’ll be a lot more of them tomorrow! Monday 26 January 2009 is Auckland Anniversary Day and in the ‘City of Sails’ that means the Auckland Anniversary Day Regatta. The first Auckland Regatta was held on the day the city was [...]

Well, what a surprise that was! This afternoon I spent some time exploring Hamilton Gardens and it turned out to be a very intriguing place! I knew it was a popular visitor destination – the most popular attraction in the region, in fact, with about 600,000 visitors each year – but I’d never actually been [...]

After an early morning trip to Omaha (just over an hour’s drive north of Auckland), it was too soon to stop for lunch on my way back through Matakana so I decided it was the perfect opportunity to try morning tea at the Brookview Tea House. Standing apart from the other Matakana boutiques and eateries [...]

From sheep shearing to sailing, it’s been a record-breaking start to 2009 in New Zealand! Yesterday, in a remote corner of Waikato’s King Country, a mother and daughter team set two brand-new world records for sheep shearing, while in Northland a fifteen-year-old may well have sailed into the record books as the youngest person to [...]

Ever wanted to watch the dissection of a Great White Shark? If so, now you can … and apparently you’re not the only one! Today the Auckland Museum held a public dissection of a 3-metre long Great White Shark, drawing a crowd of almost 4,000 fascinated onlookers. Great White Sharks are a protected species in [...]