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Prince Charles a hit with Auck teens

Mar 9, 2005 6:39 PM

Forget about his aristocratic eccentricities and his troubled love life. One group of Kiwi teenagers thinks Prince Charles is "cool" and even has a "sexy accent".

Touring Auckland on the last leg of his New Zealand visit, the 56-year-old heir to the throne met members of a charity he founded three decades ago to help poor kids across the British Commonwealth.

"He's cool," said 19-year-old Josephine Crooks, a participant in the Prince's Trust New Zealand programme.

Crooks was among mainly Polynesian youngsters who chatted with Charles during a trust function on the city's waterfront.

"I thought he was going to talk to us from a high level. But he talked to us at our level, our standard," said Crooks, describing his royal accent as "sexy".

The only drawback for the youths was being in the glare of news crews.

"The media crowded us and the cameras were going ... all these flashes were going off - we were just freaking out," said Lesley Wright, 19.

The scene, though, was a welcomed contrast to some raucous protests and breast-baring by two women in Wellington on Tuesday.

Aucklanders seemed to go out of their way to be nice to him.

About 100 people waited quietly in bright sunshine and applauded Charles when he arrived at the restaurant hosting the trust lunch.

Half as many waved him farewell about 90 minutes later.

"We take this opportunity as New Zealanders of congratulating you on your recent engagement and wishing you well for your forthcoming marriage," Maori elder Sir Tipene O'Regan of the Hanover Group said in a speech at the lunch with 200 business people and community leaders.

Charles made no mention of his fiancee Camilla Parker Bowles. He stuck to the business of the trust in his speech, except to add that he had been "disintegrating fast" with age since it was founded in Britain in 1976.

Earlier the prince flew in from Wellington to an air force base, where he inspected an honour guard and met military personnel and their families.

This afternoon he visited an exhibition of traditional and contemporary Maori weaving at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

On Wednesday evening he will attend a reception with New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and mayor of Auckland Dick Hubbard, before watching a performance of Niu Sila, a play about two friends respectively of Polynesian and European ancestry.

He leaves New Zealand for Fiji on Thursday.