It’s Christmas!

Today we experienced a response to the lack of sleep in the past few nights, coupled with the biggest change in time zones we’ve experienced since day 1 of the trip. We might have only moved two hours in front by coming to New Zealand, making us 11 hours in front of the UK, but we completely overslept this morning and spent the rest of the day feeling completely out of wack with the actual time.

Another source of disorientation was the weather. Although being sunny, it was a cold 4 degrees today, and felt like we had left the height of summer and entered Christmas overnight! This was further heightened by the radio in our hotel room playing “Christmassy music”!
The room we are staying in is quite good. There’s not much more space inside it than we had in the campervan, but every inch of space is used to the full (just like an IKEA shop display) and we quite like it. My only concern in the balcony; we’re on the twelfth floor and to say it’s vertigo inducing is an understatement!

It was afternoon before we managed to get sufficiently energetic to move outside our room and take a first look at Auckland. And even then, we just felt completely exhausted.

We managed to walk down the main shopping street, Queen Street,

towards the harbour/ marina, taking in the various boats around there,

and tried in vain to find a supermarket to buy a few provisions for the room. But this was all we were physically capable of doing. We’d probably only walked around two miles before our legs just stopped working and we couldn’t do another thing!

So we went back to our hotel room, and spent the rest of the day trying to recuperate and recover!