First order of the day was to report the loss of Sam’s passport to the UK agencies here in NZ. This turned out to be less than simple. The UK consulate is just up the street. I called them but received no answer. Sam and I visited after they should have opened but the lifts (elevators) refused to visit the floor. I called again and received the same answer message saying they should be open – no indication of holiday closures. I called an emergency number and was answered by a girl in London who said the office should be open. I explained our situation and she said that the Auckland office didn’t handle lost passports and that I should call the Auckland office or visit their website. Calling the Wellington office got me through to a another message saying that calls would cost $4.50 per minute for passport related issues. I decided to go back to the hotel and try the website.<\/p>\n

The website stated that all the offices, including the consulate here in Auckland should handle lost passports. The office here still did not respond. I got through to the operator in Auckland and asked to be put through to someone who dealt with lost passports. Here I got a chance to talk to a voice mail so I just left the details. That’s about all we can do for now. Sam flew in on his US passport so he should be good to get home and sort out a replacement UK passport from there.<\/p>\n

Next we visited the maritime museum on the shore. It was vast and quite interesting. It covered NZ maritime history all the way from the first Polynesian settlement through to modern sailing accomplishments. I would certainly recommend a visit.<\/p>\n

After lunch we wanted to go somewhere in the car. The valet service here at the hotel costs $30\/day and although this is ok during weekdays it doesn’t compete with the weekend parking rates in the local car parks. We decided to visit Mount Eden which is an old volcanic cone just a couple of miles from the center of town. Although it’s nice to have free navigation data for NZ it turns out to have a few quirks and leads to some misleading directions. Our route therefore contained a few wrong turns but we made it driving all the way to the car park at the top. From there we had some great views of the city. We stretched our legs by walking a circuit of the rim.<\/p>\n

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Next we did some clothes shopping principally to replace those that Sam had lost. Ben and Sam walked the couple of miles from the shopping area we’d found back to the hotel while we drove. We were again given some rogue directions by the sat nav and the car park we’d found walking the the previous day turned out to be tricky to reach. In the end we beat Ben and Sam back to the hotel by just a few minutes.<\/p>\n

In the evening we ate out at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Helen had spotted it earlier packed full of people which is always a good sign. It was nestled in a shady area full of massage parlours so the food was good value. All the food we ordered was good, some of it excellent.<\/p>\n

During their earlier walk Ben and Sam had latched onto a backpacker pub crawl so that was their plan for the evening. We ended up staying in and crashing fairly early.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First order of the day was to report the loss of Sam’s passport to the UK agencies here in NZ. This turned out to be less than simple. The UK consulate is just up the street. I called them but received no answer. Sam and I visited after they should have opened but the lifts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-zealand","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3942"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3946,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3942\/revisions\/3946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}