February 18, 2010
Quickly, to clarify the photos from yesterday the first picture is of the Sky Tower from Parnell. The Sky Tower is in the heart of Auckland’s Central Business District (CBD) and at 328m (60,000 ft?—I’m still getting used to metric) it is the tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere. The second photo is from dinner the first night. I was eating by myself at an Irish pub when Andrew and Vanessa, a young couple from Toronto who I met in the hostel, asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner. It was a nice cure for a spot of loneliness. The third picture is from the base of the Sky Tower. The three cables visible on the left are for people who bungee-repel off the tower. Kiwis think this is normal. I didn’t get any good shots of it but maybe another day. The last photo is of me in the CBD after lunch the second day. The smile shows you that I’m happy. The big hair is proof that it is me. I’m still experimenting with the camera software but I want to embed captions.
Yesterday I attempted to hike from the Waitemata Harbor south to the Manukau Harbor in central Auckland. Billed as a 16km, 4 hour walk I thought they were severely overestimating the time required to go 16km (750ft?). A South African girl from the hostel was planning on doing the hike and invited me. She was a….plus size girl with a great personality and a wonderful sense of humor (read between the lines). Ok, she was fat. But her proper English-South African manners made her seem smart and interesting. She insisted that she was quite sporty and scoffed at the idea of the hike taking 4 hours. When we met at the trail head—a plaque outside the ferry wharf—she was wearing a summer mu-mu and slippers made from crocs material. I pretty much knew we would be taking lots of breaks. The trail was clever and subtle, winding up through the CBD concrete jungle, up through the Auckland university campus, up through the Auckland Domain Park, up to Mt. Eden, down through the Mt. Eden neighborhood, up One Tree Hill and finally down to Onehunga at the Manukau Harbor. If you were counting that was 5 ups and 2 downs. Somehow we started at sea level, ended at sea level but spent all day hiking up steep hills. The sun was blazing and it was incredibly humid, but the hike was pretty cool. The trail was marked by small yellow markers with black arrows for the southbound trail and blue markers with black arrows for the opposite direction. The path was often poorly marked, but in a fun way that made it feel like a scavenger hunt. Sometimes the markers were embedded in the sidewalk and other times they could be nailed to a tree or fastened to a street sign. It was an informal way to see the heart of Auckland.
On the way we stopped at the Auckland Museum to see the Pacific Islander and Maori exhibits. There were tons of cool artifacts and maps showing the path of the pacific islanders to New Zealand. The localized tribes ranged from peaceful and passive to savage cannibals. As European settlers made contact, moved in and conquered the Maori societies went through an array of iterations to end up in their current state of social integration. The timelines and modus operandi are not too different from American colonist so it was like looking at an alternate version of American History.
While walking through the domain we crossed several cricket pitches. So strange. It won’t be long until I have conquered the game. It looks so silly. One of my plans is to dominate the game in 3 days and then decide if there is enough money in it to turn pro. If there isn’t then I’ll just declare it a silly game publicly and ruin the game forever. India and Pakistan will have to settle their differences over something less ridiculous.
Mt Eden, the next attraction, is a volcanic crater rising high above the city. At the top there was a really cool plaque showing the latitude, longitude, elevation, an etched map of the city and the distance and direction to important world cities.
After Mt. Eden we wandered down through the town of Mt. Eden, another Auckland college and through some quiet neighborhoods. The lack of other hikers made me feel almost like I was trespassing. The next attraction was the famous One Tree Hill, which, as you can guess, is a hill. My travel companion was in no shape to tackle another hill, but to be honest I was sweaty and tired too. We bypassed the hill and started walking through the neighborhood of Epsom on out way to Onehunga and the Manukau Harbor. As we approached a fork in the road, I asked an elderly man for directions and he asked us where we were from. When my friend replied South Africa, he addressed her in Afrikaans. When I replied San Diego, he told me he had been there but it was too crowded for his liking. We chatted for a minute while we explained our bay to bay hike. He looked at us for a second and asked us if we wanted to walk home with him and have some coffee. This really is the mentality of the Kiwis. So hospitable. Maybe it’s the common bond of being on an isolated island or maybe it’s a remnant of Victorian ideals but whatever the reason, these people are excellent.
