Auckland- The City of Sails

Auckland harbour and Sky tower

We have been here in Auckland for three days now and are at the end of our travels in New Zealand.  It’s by far the largest city in the country, however once to leave the downtown area (or CBD-Central Business District) you quickly come upon some quite distinct neighbourhoods that have a village feel to them. Apart from central downtown, no one lives in flats here and most people live in small detached homes.

Georgina Street, Ponsonby where we stayed

We were in a really lovely old area called Ponsonby with higgledy piggledy streets full of characterful wooden homes, many of them with covered porches and fancy fret work.  It would be a great place to have a place.  And as with lots of NZ towns & cities we’ve been to-the restaurants and cafes are pretty special, and there are lots of vintage and one-off small (non chain) shops selling everything from clothes to furniture to textiles and everything in between.

Inside St Kevin's Arcade

On Wednesday we were lucky to be able to spend the day with Tom and Marlene.  Tom worked with Andrew in Paris and on rotation in Algeria.  He currently works month on month off in Kazakhstan I think .Marlene, his girlfriend, is a Kiwi who we had met briefly before in Paris. Just by chance Andrew got an email from Tom to say he would be in Auckland the same time as us and that we meet up.

We had a really nice day with them. They organised a fantastic picnic in the park, then we went to Auckland Museum in the afternoon and finished off with fish and chips by the sea.

Picnic with Tom and Marlene

When we get to a city we often just wonder round on foot, go to some parks and the odd gallery or museum and of course stop for coffee/tea and food as often as we can.  Our three days here have been no different and have gone in a bit of a flash.  We noticed a lot of construction activities going on – Auckland seems like a city on a bit of a growth spurt.



St Heliers Bay Auckland



And now it’s off to San Francisco via a short stopover in LA. We cross the International Date Line which is very surreal and means we have to put our watches back a full 24 hours hours and will arrive in the States earlier than we left Auckland!  We are due to depart Auckland airport at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Friday Feb 25^th and arrive in San Francisco at 11:30 am on the same day.

Well I’ll sign off here and I think Andrew and I will do a short entry about our impressions of NZ sometime soon while it’s all pretty fresh and before some major jet lag sets in......

Bye for now.

PS – Meant to send this from Auckland airport but ran out of time and had to wait till we arrived in San Francisco.  While at the airport in Auckland we spoke with an American women who was en-route following 5 weeks of work in Antarctica and got caught in the Christchurch earthquake.  She was on the second floor of a building at the time, in her words the earthquake tossed her round and sounded like a freight train.