There was an "executive floor" in the hotel in Auckland. You went up in a different lift to everyone else, and there was a special lounge where presumably you met other "executives".
I asked a fellow traveller what exactly was the point of this. "So that you don't have to meet tourists," he explained. "You don't even have to see them." I thought this was odd. Part of the fun of being away is that you see other people travelling and wonder where they've been and what they're doing. Executives hate this, apparently. It clouds the mind.
My mind was clouded anyway with travel. The wise woman would have gone to bed. But no, not I. Once everything was unpacked, just because it was November I was determined to go and sit in the open air and have some unfamiliar fish. So off for lunch to a place called Swashbucklers on the harbour, where we fell asleep in the middle of eating grilled teriyaki in the blazing sun and woke with stripes on our faces.
The accent takes some getting used to. It's six years since I was here and when someone asked me was I going back to the hotel to bid I thought there must be some kind of an auction, but bed was actually what was meant. I say this with all the humility of one who doesn't make a universally acceptable stab at the words birthday or film, and eventually I realised that going to the chicken desk to get my ticket for Wellington had nothing to do with poultry.
IN a revolving restaurant atop the Sky Tower, it may just have been the altitude or the fact that your handbag kept sailing off to the next table unless you kept an eye on it ... anyway, I couldn't understand what anyone was saying.
We were all talking about a deeply disliked British author.
Story piled on story as the restaurant went round and round. Just another tiresome Silly Britty, said a woman.
New Zealand isn't nearly so anti-Pom as Australia, so this odd, nursery style of abuse surprised me.
Then they went on to talk about other Silly Britties whom I knew to be American, and it became more puzzling still, particularly as they were speaking well of them. They were actually talking about celebrities, as you would of course have known immediately.
Sydney is superb. Well what else is new? The brochures advertising the extravagant flat we have rented for three weeks claimed that it had a magnificent harbour view. The brochures did not lie. The famous bridge is there in front of us and the Opera House a little to the right. It's so good actually that I can't even concentrate on the television at night. I keep staring past at the twinkling lights and the little boats. And in the early morning I can see the view from the bed, but have to get up and make a mug of tea to examine it properly.
I keep getting this uncontrollable urge to ring Conor Faughnan at AA Road Watch around 7 a.m. and tell him that the Sydney Harbour Bridge is solid in both directions.
By a glorious chance the day after we got to Australia was Margaret Keneally's wedding. Margaret, who used to write for The Irish Times when she was in Dublin and is the daughter of Schindler's Ark author Thomas Keneally, married Craig Coverdale, and was given away by both her parents.
It was a fantastic wedding right from the knockout speech, (you could hardly call it a sermon) in the church, which told the whole story of Sartre's Huis Clos, to the reception itself. This was in a drop-dead elegant place called Pruniers, where a suave female MC said there would be a few three-minute speeches and the bride's father, totally ignoring her, made three separate and wonderful speeches lasting much longer than that.
Tom Keneally had a right to be euphoric, because apart altogether from the day that was in it, his new work, The Great Shame, which took him three years to research and write, is now published to huge acclaim in Australia. It's the story of the Irish deported to Australia after the Famine, their struggles when they arrived and the tragedies they left behind them. It involved research far greater than he had to do for Schindler's Ark, and he says he's exhausted.
But Tom Keneally tired is much more exuberant than the rest of us in fine form. The party went on and on.
Everyone is getting ready for the Olympics here. Huge highways that once looked as if they might never open are finished now, and the whole of Darling Harbour is being torn apart in the refurbishment work. Scores of people are planning to move out of their homes for the duration and make a financial killing. There's a block of flats near where the Olympic Village will be built and all 50 residents have arranged to go and stay with their rellies or in caravans. In return, the building will be given a huge facelift and they will each earn a nest-egg they would never otherwise have dreamed of.
There was one old guy who didn't want to move out, so the other 49 have had to agree to take him for a few days each so that the makeover of the building can be completed. He's already laying down his terms. He'd like three cold lagers for breakfast in every home, no swearing, and his own television set which he can keep on all day.
The others actually admire the old goat, they say, for his attitude, all part of the entrepreneurial spirit of Australia.
And as always, I'm knocked out by the Jacaranda trees with the blue blossoms falling to the footpath so that you can kick them as you walk, except that I want to pick them up and put them in a big dish. And the image of Ireland high as ever in the theatre where Maeliosa Stafford directs Martin McDonagh's Cripple of Inishmaan to packed houses.
And as always, the Australians are hugely concerned about issues and will argue them everywhere. The marvellous woman from Greenpeace told me that when she was making a speech last week she was heckled by a man who kept shouting Watermelon! Watermelon! at her.
Puzzled by this, she asked what he meant.
"Green on the outside but pure Red inside," he said, satisfied with his grasp of the situation.