We woke this morning to 10 degrees Celsius, but, you guessed it: the Dawn Princess had chased the rain away. We did the ship tour to Underwater World today. This is truly amazing. It was built in the old Auckland sewers and was the brain child of Kelly Tarlton. Here, we saw a replica of Scott’s hut in Antarctica. I never realized that they carted such things as the old Singer sewing machine, a piano and a record player across the ice to use in their hut. We had a ride in a snow cat where we saw the Emperor penguins. They have 80 penguins living in the artificial snow section. They play with Frisbees and balls and spend much of their time out of the water, preening themselves. This is done to put oil into their feathers to stop them feeling the cold. We were able to see the penguins swimming under water using the same wing motion as birds use to fly. There were the usual sharks, stingrays, brightly coloured tropical fish and also sea horses, which were rather cute. We were taken to a memorial to Michael Joseph Savage who was a Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand. He died in 1940 and did much during his time as Prime Minister to help the Maori people. He was much loved and the beautiful memorial to him bears witness to this. Later, we went to Skytower, which is 328 metres high. We were able to see many Auckland sights from here, including the dormant volcanoes, Mt. Eden and Mt Rainatonga. After the tour, we went shopping for cartons to post our excess luggage home, and then walked back to the ship. Auckland is a most attractive city and with only 1 million people it is not too busy. Tonight we set sail for Sydney. (Barbara) Back on board we saw a Maori dance exhibition which was excellent. Perhaps a little too much patter. (Bill)
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