Our second day in Auckland was wet and wetter - we hopped on the link bus and made our way through the rain to the War Memorial Museum and the Maori galleries. Pretty amazing carvings and a huge canoe - I tried to take a photo from one end with Anton standing at the other. Even with my fabulous new camera you cannot even see that there is a person down there at the end!

The photo is of Anton's favorite piece - a water scoop for a canoe!

We woke up yesterday to sun!!!! Had our car dropped off at the hotel and set off on our driving-in-the-left-lane adventure. . . .We both decided that it was lucky that it was Saturday (notice that we are on a different day here! :-) because wouldn't have wanted to deal with more traffic than there was. Went smoothly, however, except for a continuing problem with hitting the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal. I suppose that by the time we get home we will expect the turn signal to be on the left, and go through the same comedy all over again!

We headed to the Coromandel Peninsula where we drove up the west coast for a ways - incredible road winding along the bay, some spots straight down to the water, some spots with a rock or two on the water side with a tree clinging to it, some with trees on both sides forming a tunnel of color. The trees were blooming with red flowers - I have no idea what they are, but beautiful! Out on the rocks on the water were flocks of cormorants - grayish, instead of black. As we drove back they were still there, sitting on the same high, pointed rocks with their bills pointed to the sky, even though with the tide out the entire area was rocks.

We had planned to take a small road over the mountains to the east side of the peninsula, but the heavy rains had washed out the narrow road, so we had to go back the way we came. Went up far enough to visit Rapaura Watergardens, however. Our first foray into "natural" NZ landscape, so we were impressed. All the ferns, and lichen - though, oddly, we didn't see any mushrooms. Must be the wrong time of the year.