We left our flat to catch a 9.30 flight, forgetting a delicious croissant on the counter so had to buy breakfast at the airport. I was impressed by how well arranged the security and immigration was. Immigration was entirely through electronic gates, I had to place my passport on the reader and go, that was it. The bag scanning was exemplary: lots of scanners, a couple of people managing queues to keep things moving. A long space with lots of stations in which to place bags, separated by little walls so you couldn’t intrude on another’s space. Trays for bags appeared automatically, a person monitored the conveyor all to make sure there wasn’t a pile up before or after the scanning machine. There was a system to collect the trays and shoot them back to the start so no need to navigate empty trays or stack them up oneself. Well done, Melbourne.
Melbourne, at least, certainly left a positive impression on me, despite my animosity towards Australia as a Pakistani cricket fan. We stayed in Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne, but though I had imagined American-style suburbs, this was far more interesting. Old houses, lots of excellent cafes and trendy areas, lots of greenery of course. Generally the food was very good. Not a single dud meal, at least for me – the GF had one mediocre dinner.
Then we arrived in Auckland. New Zealand spread out beautifully beneath the plane – first the deep Pacific, then greenish-blue seas fringed with high white waves, then golden sand, then deep green forest.
Now I am in Auckland, which as a city seems less interesting and liveable than Melbourne, though it shares that fierce clear quality of light. The roads are much wider, the cars faster, and the meals I’ve had so far have been tasty but nothing out of the ordinary. Also, there are a lot of steep hills, though many are covered in ‘reserves’ – little woodland parks. And the birds are interesting. I hope I see one of the land-dwelling ones, but some of them have fascinating calls.
The most notable thing about Auckland thus far has been the ice cream parlour we went to. It was after dinner, and rather chilly, and there was a very long queue, but eventually we got inside. There, we were ushered to a counter, one out of four, where our ice cream consultant greeted us.
‘We want to be very innovative with our ice cream,’ she told us. ‘For example, our ice creams are by chefs,’ and she pointed to above her head where a woman was setting down a colourful concoction. The consultant then took us through the concept: first you choose your flavour. She brought out a little tasting platter of all the ice creams, gave a little introduction to each as we tasted, and saved for last: ‘now this one is very divisive, some people love it, some people hate it, most people don’t even want to try it.’ Despite the obvious manipulation, of course we tried it, it was a pleasant but not dramatically challenging guacamole ice cream, it would have been at home in an amuse bouche.
Next were the special cones – you could have a chocolate lined Yorkshire pudding, a Maori bread sandwich, etc. And finally there were: ‘these are the ones that people get for a special occasion, when they really want to treat themselves. It’s like buying a new handbag.’ We contemplated the chocolate squid topper, about 20 cm wide, and decided we weren’t in the market for a chocolate squid today, so got a berry and vermouth sorbet in a cone and a chocolate mousse in a Yorkshire pudding (they were out of Maori bread).
Fortunately a space opened up inside – it really was chilly outside – and we were served our ice creams. These proved rather hard to eat as they were served in waxed paper like any ice cream stands but had extravagant toppings, so we ate quickly and efficiently and left. The ice cream was certainly tasty, but it was all profoundly ridiculous.
In which it matched the book I started on the plane, a fine tome called The Spymaster’s Lover. (To avoid spoilers, stop reading now). A Regency romance, quite well written for its genre, opening with a young Frenchwoman imprisoned in a basement where one of Bonaparte’s agents is about to rape her. She coshes him in the dark with a sock full of gravel collected from the crumbling walls, picks the locks of the chains of her fellow prisoners and makes her escape with great capability. The prisoners are English spies and decide to capture her and take her to England which they achieve in the face of her unusual capability by knocking her out amidst much agonising about hitting a woman. Later, she nearly garrottes one, performs delicate surgery on another, and it is discovered (on page 96) that she is blind.