We had an 8am flight from Melbourne to Auckland, which meant we had to get up around 4am to get on a train to a bus to the airport. Ryno woke up to see us off and we really hated to say goodbye. When we landed in Auckland we were again greeted by extremely warm hospitality from Gisela (cousins with our family friend Janette Sontag) and her father (brother of Fe). We had never met them, but Auckland is a small city with a pretty small airport, so it was easy for us to spot each other.
Auckland is a really pretty city surrounded by water. They call it the City of Sails because there are more sailboats per capita than any other city in the world at about 4 people to 1 boat. The other nickname for the city is The Detroit of New Zealand, but obviously who ever coined that has never been to Detroit. It is very clean and green, with a nice downtown and cute neighborhoods. Although Auckland is largest city in New Zealand, where 1/3 of the population lives, it is still by American standards a small city.
Gisela and her family live in the Mount Eden neighborhood and their house is directly across from the Eden Park rugby stadium, where the famous All Blacks play. This cool bubble structure actually serves the function of a noise reduction besides the space age look.
We drove up Mount Eden, which is a dormant volcano. From here, you get 360 degree views of Auckland, including the CBD cityscape. There are many dormant volcanoes in Auckland that make a neat looking landscape among the water.
We passed through the Viaduct area, which was originally built for an America’s Cup and has many nice apartments and business offices. Further west towards the Auckland Bridge is this enormous boat harbor with hundreds of sail boats.
About an hour north of Auckland is Goat Island, named after herds of goat that were left on the Island for boat expeditions to replenish their food stock. Now there are no more goats, but there are tons of people there to crowd the beach and snorkel in the crystal clear water.
We took a ride on a glass bottom boat and saw some of the local fish like snapper and large kelps beds. We circled goat island and pulled into a few of the sea caves.
This is back entrance to the Auckland museum with this pretty cool architecture and delicious café (they make a mean Mac and Cheese). The museum is extensive and has three levels. Level 1 is cultural artifacts, Level 2 is natural history, and Level 3 is a war memorial. We spent the most time on Level 1, but also breezed through the other 2 levels.
The collection of Maori artifacts was amazing. The Maori were the earlier settlers of New Zealand and are likened to other Polynesian Island people. They were a kingdom of warring tribes with a very unique history and mythology. The collection included hundreds of individual pieces including sculptures, weapons, houses, boats, clothing, jewelry, and tools. Here are some of our favorite.
This is a huge war boat that could carry about 100 people and was about 100 feet long. The side is decorated with intricate carvings and mother of pearl, which is a common material used to decorate the eyes.
These are the clubs that the Maori used as weapons, as well as spears. But these things are crude and brutal, imagine crushing someone’s skull with one of these things.
The museum had this full sized Maori ancestral house. Really cool design and decorations, it must have taken a long time to complete it.
Shark tooth knives.
And battle shields.
Here are some Maori headdresses and masks.
This cloak was made of feathers from over 30,000 birds. Wow!
Some decorative belts.
Level 2 was the natural history portion of the museum and they had specimens of all kind of life, fossils, and these dinosaur skeletons.
Another interesting exhibit was the volcano room, with this heat suit. Here we learned all about volcanoes, which is a hot topic in New Zealand since they sit on dozens on them that could erupt again at any moment.
Level 3 was the New Zealand War Memorial and had many war artifacts. One of the coolest was a Japanese Zero airplane.
Heading east from Auckland, there is the Savage memorial. Australians and New Zealanders really do right by their memorials, the garden is immaculately kept and the views are amazing.
We picked up our beater of a car, a 2000 Mazda Familia with over 212,000 kms on it. Renting a car in NZ is really affordable, it was about $22 US a day. Owning a car in NZ can be quite expensive; registration is about $400-$500 a year, you have to get it road certified every 6 months, and petrol (gas) is currently $1.99 NZ per liter (roughly $6/gallon). Another interesting observation is that the car registration on every vehicle lists the year, make, and model, so there is no hiding the fact of how decrepit our car was. The Familia is not going to win any beauty contests, but it gets the job done.
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