It was all too easy to fall asleep on the plane after it left Tahiti even though we were offered food (at 5am, are they crazy?) and lots and lots of drinks from the nice Air New Zealand people. It was a shame though that Rarotonga (in the Cook Islands) was so close. After only two hours, we landed and had to leave the plane "for security reasons". So although we haven't got a separate diary section for it, we've now also visted the Cook Islands. Except that it was dark and I fell asleep in the terminal whilst and old bloke was playing happy music in the corner. Ninety minutes later though, we were carrying on as before. Heading left and down slightly.

The rest of the flight was pretty normal except that they showed Starsky and Hutch. How many times have we seen that now? A baby cried a lot, I slept, it got light, we had breakfast (again) and we landed. What happenned to the International Date Line though? Oh! Apparently we passed that a while ago. They could have said!

Whilst in the air, we had been given landing cards to fill out for New Zealand immigration and customs. The cards came with quite comprehensive instructions for filling them out and what you could and could not take into the country. It also mentioned that all luggage would be x-rayed on arrival and that not declaring something to customs was a bad idea. No problem, we thought. We had a few bits of food left over from Tahiti that we could throw in the "amnesty" bin before customs and we'd be ok with just declaring that we had some carved wood and hiking boots in our possesion. Everything was fine until we reached the x-ray machine. Customs spotted an apple that we had missed. Whoops. Unfortunately Claire's womanly charms were not enough to get us off the hook. As we had not disposed of the apple or declared it, we had in fact (albeit in error) made a false customs declaration. The apple ended up costing us a few dollars with an instant fine. And we thought the apple (from Tahiti) had been expensive in the first place!

By this time, 10:30am, we were quite tired having had very little proper sleep in the last 28 hours. We caught a shuttle bus to our hostel (hastily booked over the internet the previous night in Papeete airport). The hostel looked ok from the quick tour we had. The bed, however, looked very inviting and we had a quick nap... for four hours.

Feeling a lot brighter, we went off in search of a supermarket. We found one (as directed) about 2km away and picked up a couple of essentials. Cheese, Frosties, Satsumas and chocolate. Of course. We also ended up catching up with some cinema viewing and saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I have to say, it is perhaps one of the best films that I have seen this year. Definately one for our collection.

That's about it for now. Tomorrow we should feel less sleepy and ready to explore Auckland.