Cruise - Day 10 - Auckland

Auckland is the biggest city of New Zealand with 1.5 million people, one third of the population of the country. For some reason, I could not find enough things to do that are within walking distance. I suppose the city is big enough to spread things around. Public transport is an option but seems overly complicated for one day. Most of our group went onto a hop-on-hop-off bus tour. Being in Auckland for almost 12 hours, that is a good deal.

The two of us recruited three others to walk to the Wintergarden. We were docked at the downtown Wharf  so it is easy to just walk along the harbour to the fish market, which turned out to be a disappointment after Sydney. It has one retail store, one wholesale store and an eatery. There is renovation going on next door but we are not sure that is meant to be improvement for the existing arrangement. The Harbourfront is nice but we may be too early in the day for much activities. We saw only very light pedestrian traffic and were too discouraged to walk all the way to Silo Park.

The walk from there to the Wintergarden is good. We went through the main street, Queen Street, with many shops and the major thoroughfare for the locals; through the University of Auckland and up the hill to the Wintergarden and the Fernery. They are interesting but not too big. We wandered over to the war memorial too. We skipped the museum which would have costed us foreigners $20. They are free for locals. I kind of understand the rationale but still think that is a little mean. Anyhow, we are not museum fanatics anyway and are okay without visiting. We lasted only half an hour in Te Papa Museum in Wellington where it was free. Wouldn't be worth any kind of admission for us.

We looped back another way to the ship and saw the other side of the Harbourfront. This visit to Auckland feels a bit weird. I feel that we need to be here for a few days to make it worthwhile, like the way we did Sydney. One day is just not enough to visit places that are all spread out. At the same time, not many of places seem attractive enough to go out of the way to visit. May be another trip; then we will do the coast-to-coast walk.

After dinner, we watched the ship leaving the harbour. Throughout the criuse, we were always already moored in the morning when we get up and the ship wiuld be leaving when we are having dinner so this is the only opportunity to see the ship leave. It gave us a good view of the Auckland skyline. Looking back at the Silo Park, it was still quiet, may be it gets busy on the weekend.