Auckland Day 2
Thursday dawned bright and sunny. We decided to go to "Mount Eden", a tall hill in the middle of Auckland they have set up as a viewing site. This adventure would also offer up a little more practice driving, although the navigation turned out to be our weakness.
After checking our maps twice we set out for Mt. Eden. The trip there was surprisingly straightforward and we arrived in good time. The hill looks pretty unassuming as you approach, but the drive up is fairly steep and the road is narrow, perched on the edge of a steep drop. A large parking area is in place at the top with room for many cars and buses.
We parked and were surprised at how high we were and how complete the view was. Here are a few shots we took at the top.
Here is a more Art-y shot of Debbie.
I took a panorama of the city side, but my panorama software is acting up, so I'll have to wait to try to fix it up when we get home. Here is the best I could do. This is looking east of downtown.
There is a large round bronze plate which has the compass directions and also the names of various cities and towns with the names printed pointing in the direction of that place.
For you S/W Ontario folks, you will be interested to know that Toronto is 11 km farther away from here than is Washington DC.
We then set out to visit Karangahape Road, a street of "Funky" shops says the guide book. The night before we had taken the Auckland map up to our room to do some planning and we used it to plot our way to Mt. Eden. When we got to the car, but before we left the apartment building, we realized we had forgotten the map, but we found one of those "Tourist" maps in the map pocket of the car, so, being a little lazy, we set out with that. Although we checked our directions twice again on the Tourist map, I am sad to say our laziness, augmented with the insane street layout of Auckland, got us quite lost again. We were doing pretty well up to a point, but then we just ended up driving right off the map we had. After milling around in the south end of Auckland for a while, we finally found Dominion road, and ended up driving right past the Dive Shop it took us hours to find yesterday.
We did eventually find Karangahape road, and after parking, we wandered the street for some time. We found a street side cafe and had a cocktail while watching the locals and tourists wander by, but for once didn't take a picture of us doing it. Although the shops and restaurants were a little offbeat (think Huntsville downtown - lots of artsy crafty shops but with a pan-asian flavour) the really interesting thing to me was that the sidewalk was covered by an overhang almost the full length of the street. I'm not talking about some organized city wide thing. Each individual streetfront building had its own overhang cantilevered out from the building front. This may be a nationwide thing, as we noticed a similar fashion in some of the smaller towns we drove through on our way to Pukehina Beach on Friday.
By now the day was clouding over and we were in need of lunch, so we drove (mostly directly) back to the apartment, stopping only briefly to reserve our hotel room for the Friday night before we fly home. We selected the hotel attached to the Sky Tower, a CN Tower-esque structure in downtown Auckland. Here is a shot from below I took while waiting for Debbie to book us in.
After returning the car to the apartment parking garage, we dressed for cooler weather and set out for a late lunch. We took a look at the lovely Ferry Building which I didn't get a picture of, on the way walking one last time past the QE2.
I realize she's not the biggest cruise ship out there, but what makes the QE2 seem so large I think is the no nonsense, slab sided-ness of her profile. It's not all promenades and first class balconies and swimming pool decks. It's portholes, windows and lifeboats. It gives a very solid impression, like it would take a deliberate act of god to send her to the deep. It's like they were still expecting to have to convert her to troop ship or hospital ship duty if war broke out. Can you imagine a Princess lines cruise ship in either of those capacities?
We walked past the statue erected using the KZ1 America's Cup Challenger sailboat. At 38 Tonnes, 116 ft long, and a mast height of over 150 ft, it makes an impressive fixture (I'm not crazy ... I took a picture of the informational sign below it). Notice Debbie standing at the bottom next to the informational sign to get an idea of scale.
We settled in at a harbourfront bar/restaurant called the Loaded Hog, and had some late lunch and watched the comings and goings in what they call the viaduct harbour. This harbour is a deepwater inlet created for the America's Cup challenges held in NZ. Now it is used almost exclusively by tourist cruise boats. They have turned some of the previous America's Cup challenger sailboats into tourist excursions, and we watched a couple of them return to harbour. The one pictured below was piloted by a very skilled man. He brought that 70ish foot long, fully loaded sailboat into the narrow slip like he was parking a Mini. The people aboard applauded, and rightly so.
And here, as I am sure you were missing it, are a couple of shots of us at the restaurant.
I promised some musings on life in NZ. The first thing you notice when you land is how expensive everything seems. Even with the favourable exchange rate, most restaurant, food, hotel, etc. prices seem a bit high. One thing that offsets this is that they build the GST into the price of everything and then round up. The first day, we never saw a coin other than the 1 and 2 dollar coins. Since then we've seen the other denominations (no pennies yet) but it is uncommon to see a price not rounded to nearest quarter, and more often to the nearest 50 cents. The 50 cent piece is in common circulation and it's pretty big, larger than our two dollar coin, so you don't look forward to getting one.
Another offset to restaurant prices, at least, is the general lack of tipping. It is not common practice to tip here, except for exceptional service. The waitpersons are paid a living wage, apparently, so do not have to live off tips as in Canada. Given these moderators, we have found that prices in Auckland still seemed a little high, but not too bad. Jumping forward, we have found that outside the big city, prices are a little more reasonable, probably on par with Toronto all things considered.
We went to the grocery store in Auckland on Tuesday and looked for some snack foods to keep in the apartment. When we hit the cheese section of the store, it was amazing. We came upon one of those refrigerated islands which had a large variety of cheeses both locally made and imported. Most amazing for me was the unbelievable variety of blue cheeses available. If you like the stuff as I do, you would be amazed. I kid you not there must have been 20 different varieties of blue-ish cheeses. After being suitably impressed, we turned the corner to discover an even larger refrigerated display with another few dozen types of cheese. Turning the next corner revealed the half row of the "standard" cheeses next to the rest of the dairy goods. As a cheese aficionado, I've been in a lot of cheese shops (You do have cheese, don't you? - MP) and I've never seen anything that comes even close.
As advertised, the people here are very friendly and helpful. Aside from the idiot next to us on the way over (I saw his passport as he filled out his customs form and he was from the UK) we haven't run into a single rude person. Some wait staff are more or less helpful, but never rude or unpleasant.
Well, that's it for Thursday. On to Friday!
Don
After checking our maps twice we set out for Mt. Eden. The trip there was surprisingly straightforward and we arrived in good time. The hill looks pretty unassuming as you approach, but the drive up is fairly steep and the road is narrow, perched on the edge of a steep drop. A large parking area is in place at the top with room for many cars and buses.
We parked and were surprised at how high we were and how complete the view was. Here are a few shots we took at the top.
Here is a more Art-y shot of Debbie.
I took a panorama of the city side, but my panorama software is acting up, so I'll have to wait to try to fix it up when we get home. Here is the best I could do. This is looking east of downtown.
There is a large round bronze plate which has the compass directions and also the names of various cities and towns with the names printed pointing in the direction of that place.
For you S/W Ontario folks, you will be interested to know that Toronto is 11 km farther away from here than is Washington DC.
We then set out to visit Karangahape Road, a street of "Funky" shops says the guide book. The night before we had taken the Auckland map up to our room to do some planning and we used it to plot our way to Mt. Eden. When we got to the car, but before we left the apartment building, we realized we had forgotten the map, but we found one of those "Tourist" maps in the map pocket of the car, so, being a little lazy, we set out with that. Although we checked our directions twice again on the Tourist map, I am sad to say our laziness, augmented with the insane street layout of Auckland, got us quite lost again. We were doing pretty well up to a point, but then we just ended up driving right off the map we had. After milling around in the south end of Auckland for a while, we finally found Dominion road, and ended up driving right past the Dive Shop it took us hours to find yesterday.
We did eventually find Karangahape road, and after parking, we wandered the street for some time. We found a street side cafe and had a cocktail while watching the locals and tourists wander by, but for once didn't take a picture of us doing it. Although the shops and restaurants were a little offbeat (think Huntsville downtown - lots of artsy crafty shops but with a pan-asian flavour) the really interesting thing to me was that the sidewalk was covered by an overhang almost the full length of the street. I'm not talking about some organized city wide thing. Each individual streetfront building had its own overhang cantilevered out from the building front. This may be a nationwide thing, as we noticed a similar fashion in some of the smaller towns we drove through on our way to Pukehina Beach on Friday.
By now the day was clouding over and we were in need of lunch, so we drove (mostly directly) back to the apartment, stopping only briefly to reserve our hotel room for the Friday night before we fly home. We selected the hotel attached to the Sky Tower, a CN Tower-esque structure in downtown Auckland. Here is a shot from below I took while waiting for Debbie to book us in.
After returning the car to the apartment parking garage, we dressed for cooler weather and set out for a late lunch. We took a look at the lovely Ferry Building which I didn't get a picture of, on the way walking one last time past the QE2.
I realize she's not the biggest cruise ship out there, but what makes the QE2 seem so large I think is the no nonsense, slab sided-ness of her profile. It's not all promenades and first class balconies and swimming pool decks. It's portholes, windows and lifeboats. It gives a very solid impression, like it would take a deliberate act of god to send her to the deep. It's like they were still expecting to have to convert her to troop ship or hospital ship duty if war broke out. Can you imagine a Princess lines cruise ship in either of those capacities?
We walked past the statue erected using the KZ1 America's Cup Challenger sailboat. At 38 Tonnes, 116 ft long, and a mast height of over 150 ft, it makes an impressive fixture (I'm not crazy ... I took a picture of the informational sign below it). Notice Debbie standing at the bottom next to the informational sign to get an idea of scale.
We settled in at a harbourfront bar/restaurant called the Loaded Hog, and had some late lunch and watched the comings and goings in what they call the viaduct harbour. This harbour is a deepwater inlet created for the America's Cup challenges held in NZ. Now it is used almost exclusively by tourist cruise boats. They have turned some of the previous America's Cup challenger sailboats into tourist excursions, and we watched a couple of them return to harbour. The one pictured below was piloted by a very skilled man. He brought that 70ish foot long, fully loaded sailboat into the narrow slip like he was parking a Mini. The people aboard applauded, and rightly so.
And here, as I am sure you were missing it, are a couple of shots of us at the restaurant.
I promised some musings on life in NZ. The first thing you notice when you land is how expensive everything seems. Even with the favourable exchange rate, most restaurant, food, hotel, etc. prices seem a bit high. One thing that offsets this is that they build the GST into the price of everything and then round up. The first day, we never saw a coin other than the 1 and 2 dollar coins. Since then we've seen the other denominations (no pennies yet) but it is uncommon to see a price not rounded to nearest quarter, and more often to the nearest 50 cents. The 50 cent piece is in common circulation and it's pretty big, larger than our two dollar coin, so you don't look forward to getting one.
Another offset to restaurant prices, at least, is the general lack of tipping. It is not common practice to tip here, except for exceptional service. The waitpersons are paid a living wage, apparently, so do not have to live off tips as in Canada. Given these moderators, we have found that prices in Auckland still seemed a little high, but not too bad. Jumping forward, we have found that outside the big city, prices are a little more reasonable, probably on par with Toronto all things considered.
We went to the grocery store in Auckland on Tuesday and looked for some snack foods to keep in the apartment. When we hit the cheese section of the store, it was amazing. We came upon one of those refrigerated islands which had a large variety of cheeses both locally made and imported. Most amazing for me was the unbelievable variety of blue cheeses available. If you like the stuff as I do, you would be amazed. I kid you not there must have been 20 different varieties of blue-ish cheeses. After being suitably impressed, we turned the corner to discover an even larger refrigerated display with another few dozen types of cheese. Turning the next corner revealed the half row of the "standard" cheeses next to the rest of the dairy goods. As a cheese aficionado, I've been in a lot of cheese shops (You do have cheese, don't you? - MP) and I've never seen anything that comes even close.
As advertised, the people here are very friendly and helpful. Aside from the idiot next to us on the way over (I saw his passport as he filled out his customs form and he was from the UK) we haven't run into a single rude person. Some wait staff are more or less helpful, but never rude or unpleasant.
Well, that's it for Thursday. On to Friday!
Don
posted by Don at
9:17 pm
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