Return to Auckland

Our return to Auckland was a brief one, as we had spent a reasonable amount of time here when we first arrived in New Zealand. But the city had changed a bit since our initial visit. Very confusingly for us it had become notably warmer as spring faded into summer, but at the same time they were truly gearing up for Christmas. In other words people would be wandering around in shorts and flip flops past fake snow, pine trees and giant Christmas decorations. Really big ones. They seem to go in for that here – the biggest Santa Claus I’ve ever seen was pinned to the side of the book store opposite the cinema… he was a good 4 storeys high! Or near the harbour there was a towering yacht converted into a decoration by strewing its mast and rigging with Christmas baubles and tinsel. And every now and then you’d stumble across some massive shiny red bauble with silver snowflakes painted on the side plonked randomly in a public space – each at least 5 meters high! Oh, and the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere, was also lit up for Christmas each night in red and green. Very pretty!

But the prize for the most memorable display has to go to the department store across the road from the giant bookstore-Santa. They worked on a smaller, but infinitely scarier and more surreal scale. Each of their 8 odd shop windows was decorated with a different Christmas theme: Santa, reindeers, Snowmen, presents, mangers and so on. Which is fine - if they had left out the music. But unfortunately although each window scene was only separated by a wooden beam 5 cm thick, they all had their own individual blaring sound tracks. So you’d get ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ blending with ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’, clashing horribly with ‘Rudolf the red-nosed Reindeer’! Walking past all 8 windows was a nightmare – we were always glad to hear ‘… and a partridge in a pear tree!’ simply because it was the display on the end of the shop and therefore the last deafening assault! Why couldn’t they just pick a tune?

Anyway, on to Tahiti, where hopefully it will be warmer, and we can relax in our only truly luxury accommodation this year. In other words you can’t find any accommodation that isn’t 5 star there, so since we’ve only got a week on the island we thought we may as well check into the Sheraton and get into the spirit of things! I wonder if they have Christmas trees…