Looking for Private Tour options in Australia and NZ

[uktog]

We are on the Mercury on 6 Jan out of Aukland calling at Tarunga Napier Dunedin, Christchurch, Melbourne, Newcastle and Sydney. (we also call at Wellington but the family can look after us there if they are not sick of seeing us from the week before!)

We usually do a mix of private guides and ship excursions and we are looking for recommendations for private guides now we can see what the ship can offer us.

In particular looking for something special for Day 1 in Sydney as it is my birthday - the ship offers a rather nice (but expensive) floatplane and restuarant trip and we wonder if we can get that elsewhere and also have a driver do a city sightsee with us (next day we will be going home via a wildlife park I beleive!)

 

Thanks in advance for the advice

AJ

[mare s.]

There's lots of information about private tour guides posted here. Certainly, for Tauranga, contact Mount Classics (see banner ad above) We spent a wonderful day with driver Alan visiting Rotorua, lunching at Fat Dog Cafe (a real hoot), and seeing sights along the way. In Christchurch we opted to take a jet boat ride with Alpine Jet Boats...we were picked up in Lyttleton and saw a great deal of countryside with excellent commentary by the driver, Roger, before arriving at Jet Boats...at our request we were dropped back in Christchurch with plenty of time to walk around town ourselves. We walked Dunedin ourselves, went to their wonderful museum, and arranged the Speight's Brewery tour on our own. Also had lunch next door at the Alehouse...great food, great atmosphere, and quite inexpensive. However, we know lots of people who took tours through Arthur's Tours out to the Otago Peninsula and really loved it.