Auckland

We have spent the day walking up, over and down Auckland. We started off in Karangahape Road (colloquially K’Road) a laid back street in the southern part of town where there are numerous cafés – we had some really good muesli and coffee – oh to have good real coffee again! All those places in central/south America that grow coffee but export it all serve some of the most awful stuff imaginable – it’s usually Nescafé instant, Peruvian concentrate or weak American ‘Joe’; one of the guys we met on our trip in Peru ordered café con leche in one place and got a cup made up of half concentrate and half Carnation milk – yuk! We got so desperate at one point that we even went to a Starbucks! Shock, Horror, Gregg in a Star*ucks. Auckland has good coffee shops on almost every street corner. K’Road has plenty; it was formerly an uptown residential area for prosperous 19th century merchants but it is now a decidedly raunchier part of town with music shops selling some really serious electric guitars, drum kits and saxophones (come ON Gregg) and one huge store specialising in vinyl discs (Gregg, do come on) as well as clothes shops selling budget designer wear and a huge range of Asian stores and restaurants – at one end there is a corridor of massage parlours and strip joints interspersed with mainstream nightclubs but at the time of day we were there it was not at all intimidating (or in the slightest bit interesting).
We walked past Symonds Street Cemetery, one of the city’s earliest burial grounds with different areas for Jewish, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Anglican and Roman Catholic faiths – the last two areas were largely destroyed by the motorway the city put through the area in the 1960’s. We then went to large park area called The Domain which has some formal gardens – one of them is called the Wintergarden and has two barrel-roofed glasshouses – one temperate and one tropical – filled with neatly tended plants. Behind this area is a fernery a dell with over a hundred different types of fern (most of them native to NZ and Australia) – we really enjoyed that.

The highest point in The Domain is crowned by The Auckland Museum with a Greco-Roman style portico entrance (built 1929). The museum has three floors; the ground floor is predominantly devoted to Polynesian (mainly Maori) artefacts but strangely there is also a section with 19th and 20th century items (mainly from the UK) including ceramics by Bernard Leach, Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and others of the ‘great’ studio potters era, furniture from Liberty and design ‘classics’ such as an electric kettle. The middle floor comprises the natural history galleries and the top floor is called ‘Scars on the Heart’ an emotional exploration of New Zealand’s involvement in war. So the place tries to be the Auckland equivalent of the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, The V&A, The Imperial War Museum, The Geffrye Museum etc., all in one place and does not succeed in any area. We were very disappointed. Despite having some magnificent Maori carvings including a complete meeting house and a war canoe designed to seat 100 warriors it is all so badly displayed e.g. items behind highly reflective glass which has joins running right in front of some of the best exhibits, very poor lighting, thousands of the same item (there are only so many shell necklaces one can marvel at), terrible acoustics made even worse by numerous audio-visual displays competing with each other coupled with kids who didn’t really want to be there resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony.

Glad to be back in the parkland but by now the sky had clouded over and rain threatened, undeterred we continued with our walk, past the Art Nouveau Civic Theatre (Jools Holland playing next month) almost right next to a postmodern multiplex cinema and the 19th century civic centre on to the inevitable shopping centre, all of it dominated by the skytower – a-mid 1990s ‘spike’ that rises 328metres above the city with obligatory observation decks and a revolving restaurant at the top (no, we didn’t go there) – all-in-all a real hodge-podge of urban planning (or perhaps lack of planning) but an excellent veggie lunch and more coffee and we felt OK about it – especially as everyone is so informal and friendly.