Well last night was an adventure. Thanks to the cyclone dismissively referred to as “Gabby” by the New Zealanders we’ve met, we were stuck in Auckland without a flight or a hotel room. Communication from the airport staff was not great but once they realized that hundreds of folks had no place to go a number of staff made water and blankets available. Thanks to the cardboard that Robin scavenged and polar fleece blankets from the fire department we managed to get a little sleep. The challenge was the disorienting light: it’s always high noon in the airport lighting department so you have no idea what time it was when you woke up in the middle of the night! This didn’t help mitigate the jet lag.
This morning more chaos as the Air New Zealand ticket desk was flooded with customers trying to rebook cancelled flights. Just when it looked like we were facing brutal connecting flights through Fiji and/or Sydney to get to Brisbane, someone in the line mentioned to Robin that she’d been able to convince a rep at Air Canada to step in and rebook the flight. After many $$$ in roaming charges… success. We now leave on Friday for Brisbane.
So we’re visiting Auckland for a few days! This actually worked out pretty well as we only had a day scheduled here in March at the outset of the New Zealand portion of the trip, which we regretted. So while we won’t get to spend much time in Brisbane, spending time in Auckland is a pretty great consolation. We trained it downtown from our hotel out by the airport (actually we walked-bussed-waked then trained) and had a great day in the harbour district.
This part of the city is pretty striking. With the Sky Tower (if the CN Tower and Space Needle had a child) a convenient landmark the harbour is both welcoming and impressive. Auckland is known as the City of Sails and there is certainly a very impressive range of boats and ships (one estimate puts the number somewhere north of 70,000).
Two really cool areas are the recently revitalized Viaduct Basin and Wynyard Quarter. Peppered with cozy warf-side restaurants both are wonderful to walk or bike. The city has hundreds of kilometres in trails. We were really taken with the ‘Silo Park’ area in Wynyard Quarter: as you can see below they made great use of industrial ruins to create an inviting public space.
I found it interesting that one of the driving forces behind the revitalization of the harbour front was New Zealand’s hosting of the America’s Cup sailing race in 2000 and again in 2021. This picture was taken looking out from the elevated park. You can see the shipyard for the New Zealand America’s Cup team in the background along with a skate park and multi-purpose sports fields. I thought it was a really nice way to mix an institution that is the focus of so much national pride with these really accessible recreational resources for the community on some pretty choice waterfront land. Good on ya Aucklanders!
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