Well it was bound to happen – in all of the time we’ve spent in New Zealand over the years, we’ve been spared rain. Today, it rained. Not hard … rarely more than drizzle, but enough to keep us from venturing too far.
We took advantage of the dry morning to walk up our first Auckland volcano, Maungawhau. We picked our way through the quiet Sunday morning back streets to the suburb of Mount Eden. While not real high or real big, the summit of Maungawhau (smack bang in the middle of Mount Eden) affords quite stunning views of the city over the grassy bowl of the crater. We took some pictures before walking back down to the to the town; a rather lovely strip of bookshops and coffee shops provided some shelter from the now persistent, soaking drizzle.
We then made for Pah Homestead; a rather odd modern art gallery set in a rather lovely old house. We killed an hour looking at complicated and curious works before picking our way back through the suburbs to our apartment (which has been turned into a Chinese laundry after our visit to the laundrette last night).
For our final evening in Auckland we are heading to Glenfield Night Market to sample some local food trucks wares. If we see anything of note this evening, we will be sure to update today’s post.
I like Auckland more today than I did when we arrived. Auckland grows on you. Sure, it’s seems like it’s a big, brash, noisy city but that’s not really the case. Everything we’ve seen, all we’ve experienced here has been rather nice, thoughtful, sensible, well thought out. We’re happy to be moving on but have nice memories of the last few days.
Addendum: We headed out into a drizzly Sunday night, found Glenfield, and shortly after found the night market. Everything we’d read was true; the market is on the ground floor of a mall car park, they are a mix of live music and food from around the world. It was very good (and tasty) and not a little surreal.
The Obligatory Blog 