Last few days on land ...

Back in New Zealand. As little as I like Auckland it's nice to be back – it kind of feels right.

Had a lovely Easter weekend in Sydney however. On Saturday, shortly after I arrived from Katoomba, my friend Jess and some of her friends and I all went off to Cockatoo Island for the night. Cockatoo Island is pretty much in the middle of Sydney harbour, not far from land. When the Europeans first arrived it was used as a prison for convicts transported from Norfolk Island; later it became a reformatory school; and then a shipyard until the 1990s. In 1992 they closed the shipyard down and it's been empty until recently. A couple of years ago they reopened the island to the public and you can get a ferry there during the day. At night you can camp – they have tent sites as well as quite a lot of permanent tents, and there are barbeques for cooking. We got a couple of the permanent tents and pitched two ordinary ones and had a very pleasant evening, first exploring the island a bit and then just hanging out, chatting and playing cards. Slept okay apart from being woken by the rain in the night and the kids doing an Easter Egg hunt at about 6.30am (there were a number of families there. Annoyingly the kids all stole the little chocolate eggs thoughtfully placed outside each tent by the campsite managers – but one of Jess's friends very kindly gave us all Easter bunnies, so there was chocolate after all.)

In the afternoon, after we'd packed up and left the island, we did a walk along the coastline from the Spit Bridge to Manly. It's a good walk, about 10km but not generally difficult, with pretty views back towards the city and even some Aboriginal petroglyphs along the way. There were also some decent-sized lizards, pelicans and lorikeets to be seen. Australia does have interesting wildlife!

Yesterday morning, after dropping people off at the airport and the railway station, Jess and I went to the Royal Easter Show. Sydney has found a good use for its Olympic park, hosting shows there a lot according to Jess, and the whole central chunk of it was taken up with the show. We spent quite a bit of time in the food hall sampling things, but also watched a couple of heats of single-handed sawing in the woodchop arena (seriously – they race to see who's the fastest at sawing through a log) and managed to catch glimpses of the pig racing. We wandered around the smelly enclosures for the alpacas, llamas, cows, horses, sheep and pigs as well as the flower show where there were an enormous number of amazing dahlias on display. We finished up at the food hall again for a lunch of more samples! On the way back to Jess's we had a swim in her local outdoor 50m saltwater pool – it's a lovely pool apart from the salt, which I'm not a huge fan of really. Then the airport, and the flight back to Auckland, arriving at midnight as the Aussie flights tend to.

Today I'm trying to sort out my luggage for sailing, but tomorrow hopefully I'll get a chance for a last bit of sightseeing before leaving NZ. If it's nice, I'm planning to visit Rangitoto. If it's not, I might go to the Antarctic centre or maybe the museum again.

Currently uploading photos after finding a cheap internet cafe with an actual fast connection. Woohoo.