DAY 3 - AUCKLAND WELCOMES US....

Travelling on a long distance flight for about 14 hours is an awesome experience in itself if you have a lot of patience or have the gift to fall asleep even in sitting position or you have a great company with you... and luckily i had all the three with me.. i and vathika spent some time watching movies on board and playing a few online onboard games, slept, ate, slept,ate till finally strong sunlight woke us up...and soon we were informed by our pilot that we were about to land in auckland in 25 miunutes ...

ramp near kelly tarltons

from top of sky tower

     Auckland city looked beautiful from 10000 ft high  .. not dense at all more like a hill station than a major city. we landed at 10 past 1 in the noon, the airport was beautiful to say the least and the weather outside chilling thanks to the rains that welcomed us in new zealand. the immigration officer was fascinated to know that we were on our honeymoon and was more so wen i said i was an otolaryngorhinologist.. in new zealand ent surgeons are the third highest paid professionals..new zealand has strict rules for things which u can carry into it  as it is isolated from rest of the world.. they dont let you carry any  food articles of any sort, if ur shoes
are muddy u are made to clean it and wash it dry before u are let out of the airport.. a 7 ft 150 kg customs officer was interrogating a 5 ft hardly 50kgs chinese student who had packed 10 odd kgs of ready to eat noodles in a bag!!! after getting out of the immigration and various scans and frisking we  collected our luggage and reached the lounge looking for our chauffeur.. we did not find him anywhere  and when we were still searchin g for him we bought a vodafone prepaid sim card , exchanged few dollars for nz dollars and also collected some auckland information booklets.. and thenm i found a chauffeur with my dad name printed on it and realised it was for us ... he was dressed in a 3 piece suit and with a ford falcon he looked more like an executive from a top level corporate office and we looked out of place in tracks and some silly looking dress..nevermind we got into the car and a well behaved gentleman he was... gave us all details about auckland and a few aspects about new zealand.. it was raining very heavily and it was summer there..so much for the weather in nz..

we reached the sky city hotel in auckland and checked into the amazing room .. a 5 star hotel with a 24 hour casino , 5 restaurants , world famous sky tower and an awesome discotheque... we needed a shower after the long joureney and in no time we were on the road looking for a taxi to take us to kelly tarltons  underwater world.. the drive showed us the whole of auckland and it indeed looked heavenly. the underwater world had and artificial setup for the penguins and a lot of fishes and underwater life.... we spent a couple of hours and then got back to the hotel and  bought tickets to get on top of sky tower to get panaromic view of the whole city.. the panaromic view of the whole city was fantabulous.. and a couple of mocktails later we were back in the room . we ordered for a pizza from dominos and garlic bread was the best ever i have had.. we then got dressed for the casino and tried our luck at a few .. lost the bucks and then entered the disco and let music take control of us.... it was 0000 hours .....