NZ at last.

Another more overnight flight.  I'm reduced to watching "You've Got Mail" , so old fashioned!  Has Meg Ryan ever not worn pyjamas in a film?  I think George Burns once said, "I'm so old  can remember Doris Day before she became a virgin" but even she, in The Pajama Game wore only the top half.  In the long dark watches of the night, I was reduced even further to "Wonder Woman". Due to a temporary (temporal?) glitch I missed the last 5 minutes so don't know if she survived or what was the secret Hippolyta had kept from her but I gather she saved the world anyway.

We first visited NZ about 24 years ago.  We went out one evening from our hotel in the centre of Auckland at about 9pm and failed to find anything to eat or drink. Everywhere was dark, silent and closed. Twelve years ago a small gay area had emerged on Ponsonby Rd.  You could get a meal even after 9pm.  Now Ponsonby is all cafes, clubs, posh clothes shop and coffee bars selling CBAs (Chicken, Brie and Avocado is the new BLT - probably is in Bristol as well for all I know).

I discussed the ending of Wonder Woman with a shop assistant there while Eleanor looked in vain for something that hadn't been designed for a malnourished hobbit obssessed with Hello Kitty.  He couldn't remember the ending either.  What was the point of it, he wondered.  Me too.  Women with metal underwear?  Nobody, he said, was that weird. 

Auckland itself seems much more crowded, busy, cosmopolitan and, especially, hot. However our AirBnB is quiet and peaceful.  There are chickens in the garden, a banana palm with evil looking buds,  a small lime tree with lots of fruit and a rampant bed of squash. 

The garden has been visited by a steady stream of monarch butterflies all coming to the same bush to lay their eggs - the bush hasn't many leaves and I worry for the health of the million caterpillars - and the plant.

The photo doesn't do credit to the monarch: she has a wingspan of 3 to 4 inches and glides elegantly around the garden as if she owned it.

Nearby there's a very posh organic, fairtrade, hand knitted from tofu, almost free from everything, NZ produce supermarket.  For about £8 you can buy a small jar of honey.   Across the road is a forbiddingly strange, matt black cuboid.  A mysterious narrow walkway leads around it.  All that's missing is "Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here".  Follow the path out of sight of the organic shop and enter a door.  Surprisingly you are in a supermarket selling ordinary stuff at about half the price.  Leave quietly, make sure nobody is watching.

Continue across some grass to a tree lined path to the bay.

We relax.