Day One: Am I still in Seattle?
It's approximately a 13 hour plane flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, and most of that time I was passed out. It was a blessing, because I was in the middle seat and the woman to my left was coughing as if she'd drop dead any second, and the gentleman to my right was in dire need of a shower. Please don't let me catch this woman's sickness before I've even arrived for the start of my trip.
I recommend an evening flight from L.A. for those coming from the states. It's about the shortest flight possible, and because Auckland is just 3 hours behind Los Angeles (and one day ahead), you can arrive in the morning and hit the ground running. Adjusting to the time change is simply a matter of staying up a few hours past your bedtime. I'm on sabbatical. No problem.
Perfect
weather greeted me (see photo to left). 70s Farenheit, bluebird skies,
minimal humidity. This is why we Americans flee to the Southern Hemisphere
during the winter, why everyone should descend on New Zealand from February
to April.
For the next two days, I was on my own. After lying in my hotel room for about an hour, I showered and forced myself out into the city just before lunchtime. When I travel alone, I oscillate between two personalities. One part of me wants to keep to myself and hide in the hotel room, and the other wants to scatter myself all over town and meet people as soon as possible. A walk around town seemed like a sensible compromise.
My
hotel was right next door to Skycity, the entertainment center at the
base of the Skytower. I strolled from there down towards the water, down
to the American Express Viaduct Harbor (see photo to right). This village
by the water was built several years back to support the America's Cup
after New Zealand won the Cup. It can hold up to 88 super yachts (yachts
30 meters or more in length) and is flush with hotels, restaurants, shops,
bars, and museums.
At
the time, the America's Cup
was just two weeks away and would be raced right there off the coast of
Auckland, and the entire city had sailing fever (see photo to left). New
Zealand was set to defend the cup against the Swiss challenger Alinghi.
Adding to the drama was the fact that seven members of the Alinghi crew
were top Kiwi sailors who had defected to Alinghi thanks to the deep pockets
of Alinghi owner Ernesto Bertarelli, most notably skipper Russell Coutts
and tactician Brad Butterworth, who led New Zealand to victory in 1995.
Americans will recognize the parallel to George Steinbrenner and the deep-pocketed
Yankees. Bertarelli, Coutts, Butterworth, and the other Kiwis exploited
loopholes in America's Cup rules which allowed them to race for the landlocked
Swiss simply by owning homes in Switzerland, ones paid for by Bertarelli.
Of course they rarely lived there.
Each
of the America's Cup challengers had a specific hangar and dock in the
Viaduct (see photo of the One World hangar and dock to right), though
most were empty since only two competitors remained. One of the Alinghi
yachts was out and is visible to the far left of the photo at the right,
though the keel was hidden away from the view of competitors. New Zealand
would later lose the America's Cup, getting swept by the Swiss 5-0, but
though they won't host the next regatta the entire Viaduct was a great
addition to the city and will be a great resource for the fervent sailing
community and tourism for years to come.
Auckland reminds me of Seattle. Both are cities by the water with highest per capita rates of sailboat ownership of any city in their respective countries (1 in 4 is the figure oft quoted for both cities, though I'm not certain of its accuracy). Auckland has its Skytower, Seattle its Space Needle; slight edge to Auckland because you can jump off of the Skytower (more on that later). Both have large markets: Auckland has the Victoria Park Market, Seattle has the Pike Place Market. Give the edge to Seattle because Victoria Park Market has none of the fine restaurants, cafes, fresh seafood and produce of Pike Place Market.
The best way to see the highlights of Auckland quickly is aboard the United Airlines double-decker Explorer Bus. For NZ$25 you can get on or off as many times per day as you'd like as long as the bus is running between 9am and 4pm. It visits 14 of the top tourist destinations in Auckland and is a bargain. After making the mistake of trying to walk to Kelly Tarlton's, I grabbed a two day ticket to the Explorer Bus instead and cruised over.
Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Encounter and Underwater World is an underground aquarium of sorts, with a few key exhibits. One is a recreation of Captain Robert Scott's camp in Antarctica. Scott, a contemporary of Sir Ernest Shackleton, journeyed to Antarctica twice. The second time, he and his four companions perished on the ice, just 11 miles, a day's hike, away from an outpost where food and shelter awaited. Fascinating stuff, including lots of great black and white prints from the photographer on Shackleton's famous expedition.
The other two more famous exhibits there are the live underground penguin colony, which you travel through on a heated Snow Cat, and the Underwater World in which you ride a moving walkway through a tunnel carved under the ocean. The kings of this underwater neighborhood include stingrays, manta rays, and sharks. Kelly Tarlton's was worth about an hour of entertainment, bearing in mind that whenever a guidebook recommends spending a certain length of time in a place, I always spend half that time when exploring alone.
My
next stop was the Auckland Museum
(see photo to left) which is famous for housing the world's largest collection
of Maori and Polynesian artifacts. The Maori people are the indigenous
people of New Zealand. Like the American Indians or the Aborigines of
Australia, they ceded most of their lands to white Europeans who came
over by ship. I was reminded of the fabulous book by Jared Diamond, Guns,
Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
The museum itself is free, as are many of the museums in New Zealand, one of the wonderful things about the country. I paid NZ$10 to see the Maori cultural performance by the Manaia Maori Performance Group, a performance I later saw repeated in Rotorua at the Whakarewarewa Village. You need only watch one. Key concepts I learned: the Maori greeting is "Kia Ora" and is preceded by touching noses twice, Maori warriors stick out their tongues when doing their war dance to intimidate their opponents, Maori women do a dance with two white balls attached at the end of strings, and Maori men and women toss and twirl wooden sticks to strengthen their wrists and improve their hand-eye coordination.
Thanks to my late start, after exploring the museum for a bit I headed back downtown on the last Explorer Bus. I spent some time walking the streets of Inner City, the shops and restaurants. While walking by the Skytower, I noticed a group of people milling about at ground level, staring up at the sky. Curious, I looked up and spotted two long cables hanging down from the sky, and then a short time thereafter, someone falling from the sky between them. He slowed down as he neared the ground and landed softly on a platform. His suit had been attached to a cable which had controlled his descent. This was the Skyjump. Hmmm. I filed it away in my mind for the next day.
Dinner at Mai Thai (57B Victoria St. W.) proved worthwhile. The gaeng kiew wahn ped yang (roast duck with green-chili paste in coconut milk) was a winner. Then I decided to venture out to Parnell, a wealthy neighborhood with a street lined with trendy, yuppie-ish restaurants and bars and pricey shops. For some reason I chose to walk, and it took me a good hour or so to get there from the Inner City, taking me through some dark and somewhat sketchy streets. I stopped for a beer at Iguacu which looked from outside like a happening place. Turned out most of the folks there were businessmen in their suits, looking to pick up women. I didn't meet anyone interesting so I hopped a cab home and fell asleep to some Discovery documentary about FBI forensics detectives.
Day Two: Don't Jump!
I got an earlier start on day two and hit another series of tourist destinations on the Explorer Bus. First up was brunch at Mission Bay, then a visit to the extinct volcano Mount Eden, followed by lunch at Cin Cin on the Quay, a two hour Fuller's Auckland cruise, and finally a perfunctory stroll through Victoria Park Market (not worth visiting).
But most of the day my mind was trying to scratch a mental itch called Skyjump. At some point during the day, I knew I couldn't live with myself if I didn't head over there. When I first arrived at the base of the Skytower, I wavered. I couldn't even see the top where the cables connected. My palms started to sweat. It reminded me of being in Zimbabwe again, by myself, trying to psych myself up to do the bungy jump off of the bridge between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Why did these things always occur when no one else was around? These things are always easier in the company of friends or girls to impress.
To ease myself into it, I paid for a ticket up to the top to take a look around. Not a good idea. There were several glass floors at different portions of the observation deck, and my legs went soft just standing over them, looking down. I had bungy jumped and skydived before. Why the sudden hesitation? I chided myself. One skill I've always possessed is the ability to turn off various portions of my brain when pushing into nerve-wracking situations, and it served me well here. I paid for the Skyjump like a zombie (the only emotion being a grimace at the NZ$195 price; why are extreme sports so expensive?) and the next thing I knew I was on the platform with two guys ready to help me over the edge. Actually, once I was up there on the platform I didn't feel as scared as I had just looking down through the glass floors in the observation deck. Who knows why? Perhaps it was being in the company of others, making small talk. Don't get me wrong, though. My stomach was churning.
They strapped the cable to my suit and I stepped out to the edge of the platform where I held on to two metal bars. The whole time up there I was playing it cool, laughing casually with the two guys. They asked me if I was nervous, scared. Nah, I said. Bring it on. I was Cool Hand Luke on the outside, and Clammy Hands Puke on the inside. The visual context of the skyscrapers and the city streets lent the whole affair the feel of suicide.
Well, the two guys must not have liked my answers. They counted down quickly from 5 to 1, and I stepped off of the platform. Just as my center of gravity passed the point of no return, the two guys suddenly shouted, "Wait! Wait! Don't go yet!"
My heart stopped as I tumbled over. I reached up and lunged at the cable above me as I fell into the void. I was falling to my death.
10 meters down from the platform, I jerked to a halt, flailing like Gollum with Elvish rope about his neck. The two guys on the platform were snorting they were laughing hard. If I could have grabbed hold of the cable above me, I would have climbed up and thrown them off the side of the platform. They apologized for the prank, snapped a photo of me, and then, without warning, released the winch and set me dropping towards the remaining 182 meters to the platform below. The descent is not nearly as fast as the one you'd experience bungy jumping or sky diving, so after a few seconds I settled in and enjoyed the view on the way down.
At the bottom, I told the worker there what his mates up top had pulled, and he said they did that all the time. I later learned that it was true from a tour guide named Russell. They like to tear down the brave, or those who give the appearance of nonchalance.
At
night, I attended the New Zealand premier of the movie Whale
Rider with a theater full of Kiwis (theater pictured to the left).
Whale Rider is about a Maori tribe looking for a leader in modern
times. By the movie's end, most of the Kiwis were teary-eyed. I highly
recommend the movie. It focuses on the usual challenges in retaining cultural
identity in the modern age (hint: eliminating some of the patriarchal
and sexist attitudes towards women is a good start). The lead, 12 year
old Keisha Castle-Hughes, is adorable.
The day's excitement had exhausted me. All that walking and sunlight, mixed with a dose of jet lag, had sapped me of my stamina. I headed back to the hotel and packed up in preparation to board some type of bus early the next morning. It would prove to be my last day on my own during my stay in New Zealand.
Next: A surprising influx of travel companions, and the Bay of Islands
Auckland is the most populous city in all of New Zealand (1.3 million of the 4 million Kiwis live here), and situated at the top of the North Island, it's a popular starting point for Americans traveling to Kiwi country. Many consider Auckland to be New Zealand's Sydney.
Discover Auckland, the official online guide to New Zealand's most populous city
United Airlines Explorer Bus, a great way to hit most of the sightseeing highlights of Auckland
Auckland's Skytower/Skycity,
the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere
Jumping off of the Skytower
Climbing the Skytower antenna
Kiwi: the more popular term to refer to a New Zealander.
If you want to experience sailing on a former America's Cup winning boat, head down to Viaduct Harbor and book time on NZL 40, built for the 1995 America's Cup in San Diego. You can get your hands dirty and help the crew sail, or just sit back and enjoy the view. More info at www.sailnewzealand.co.nz
Fuller's Auckland charters a whole variety of cruises out of the Ferry Building on Quay Street.