Auckland

We decided to splurge and spend some time at a marina since anchoring options were limited near this major city. We went into Westhaven Marina based on a local recommendation, but were disappointed at the 40 minute walk to downtown. The rain made the walk even less enjoyable and we soon started using taxis and busses to get around.

The skyline is dominated by the needle-shaped skytower. At 328 metres, it is the tallest man-made structure in New Zealand and offers breathtaking views for up to 80 kilometres in every direction. You can get clipped into a safety harness and walk around a platform above the city or (almost) bungee jump from the top. I say almost since you are attached to 3 separate wires during the jump and your fall is decelerated as you fall and gently braked at the bottom. We would have liked to go to the top and see the view but at almost a $100, it seemed like a waste of money to this tourist family. We saw much prettier views (than a city) for the cost of a 30 minute hike on many of the islands we visited so far.

We did go to the famous Auckland museum and the Auckland Zoo and found both to be well worth the effort to visit them.

The Auckland museum houses a large collection of Maori and Pacific Island artefacts and treasures, including for example three entire buildings, including Hotunui, a large carved meeting house built in 1878 at Thames, and Te Toki a Tapiri, a waka taua (war canoe) from 1830. The museum also stores a photographic collection of 1.2 million images, and stores and exhibits 1.5 million natural history specimens from the fields of botany, entomology, geology, land vertebrates and marine biology. Its collections concentrate on New Zealand history (and especially the history of the Auckland Region), natural history, as well as military history. The museum also shows the now extinct giant flightless bird, the Moa, that last great Maori war canoe used in battle, and two authentic World War II aircraft, a Mitsubishi Zero and a Packard Merlin Mark XVI Spitfire.

 

 

The Auckland Zoo is a 40-acre zoological garden. It has New Zealand's largest collection of animals and is recognized as one of the most progressive zoos in the world. A winner of national and international environmental-related awards, it is home to 117 different species and over 700 animals. Most of the larger animals are contained within moated, barless, naturalistic enclosures that are very spacious.

 

After 4 days we all had enough of the big city and pointed the bow north to explore a small island that was rumored to have wild wallabies hopping around. The crew of Emily Grace could not pass up that opportunity and, Dear reader, you will have to stay tuned to find out if we actually saw any of these kangaroo-like macropods.

Tom