Auckland (Part 2) – Back In The City Of Sails

We finally made it back full circle in Auckland after 6,000 kilometers of exploring New Zealand. It was nice to see familiar faces and to again be treated to extremely warm hospitality. We spent a day gathering ourselves and getting caught up on a few things, but then set out again to explore more of Auckland.

Gisela took us to a local pizza joint for their weekly quiz night. The pizza was very good, but our ability to answer questions correctly was very bad. We did fairly well on pictures of pyramids from around the world, but got absolutely blanked on New Zealand history (no surprise) and did very poorly in Animals and Quotes (but seriously, how many May West quotes do you know and there were two of them).

The next day Gisela took us to Voyager, which has to be the most extensive maritime museum in the world. It is an entire wharf with room after room of boats and exhibits. We only spent a few hours, but could have easily spent the whole day.

The entrance to the museum included a ride on a sail boat Ted Ashby, which is a square bottom boat modeled after transport vessels used in the late 19^th century to the early 20^th century to move things like coal and timber around New Zealand. That day was not particularly windy, so we “sailed” using the inboard motor.

We did assist the crew made up of retiree volunteers with of an average age of 70+ hoist the sails for posterities sake. It was a nice calm hour-long journey to the Auckland bridge and back. The only extraordinarily eventful thing that happened was when the captain rammed the ship into the dock as we pulled in afterwards, creating enough of a ruckus to draw the attention of the entire museum restaurant.

We got a great view back towards the Auckland CBD and got to see a retired America’s Cup boat sailing tourists around. There was very little wind, but that boat was still moving at an incredible pace; it was definitely doing laps around our own retired crew.

We sailed under the Auckland Bridge and checked out the bungee jumping platform situated underneath it.

Back on land we toured the museum. One room was focused on the whales and dolphins of the region. It had a lot of interesting information about the different types of whales, whale behavior, and the past whaling industry and current plight of many of them. Pictured is an old harpoon gun used to hunt whales in New Zealand, who no longer has whaling industry and is a big advocate of stopping the practice. In fact, Japan is really the only nation that is still hunting whales for “research purposes”. Somehow the research subjects end up in their supermarkets.

Another section had a collection of Polynesian and Pacific Island vessels. This outrigger boat was really cool with a little hut on it and was used ceremonially.

There were a number of different model boats, this one is of a French ship that traveled to New Zealand in the 1800’s. Vince has a special affinity for model ships and has aspirations to acquire one.

This recreation of an early 19^th century hull is arguably the best exhibit in the museum. Not only does it recreate the conditions of early travelers to New Zealand visually, the entire room sways back and forth to the sounds of a creaking ship giving you the full experience.

Another amazing exhibit is dedicated to the America’s Cup and New Zealand being the only country besides the United States to win it, even though they have only entered the competition in the 90’s. This is the actual boat that won the 1995 America’s Cup.

They have a bunch of very cool interactive displays including a program where you can build your own racing boat and the one pictured where you virtually work together as a team to race the boat. They also had other rooms including ship mast figures, pictures from an Antarctic expedition, replicas of seaside homes, and a really great one about Peter Blake who spearheaded New Zealand competitive sailing. He had a great personality that he was able to use to raise money to fund the expensive endeavor, including the nationwide sales of his trademark lucky red socks.

Afterwards, we ate some delicious, monstrous burgers and drove out to a natural hot spring complex north of Auckland. It included this hot Movie Pool with a big screen playing movies. We caught the tail end of Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories and the beginning of Cats and Dogs 2; needless to say we were not the demographic the pool was designed for. They also had three slides, two of which would definitely not meet code in the US. Vince managed to bang up his shin pretty bad (after Megan clearly instructed him not to get hurt) on one called the Black Hole. It’s basically a metal pipe that makes it completely dark, which spins you around until you reach unnatural speeds and dumps you out almost vertically into a pool of hot water. Highly recommended to those who do not fear death by water slide.

Back in Auckland, we were treated to a beautiful sky that illuminated the plastic bubble of Eden Park stadium. A perfect way to end our time in pound for pound the most beautiful country we have seen.