Tag Archives: Tourism

Arrival to Auckland

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Tuesday 10 February 2025 – In many ways it’s nice to have a late start to one’s travels. No early morning stuffing last-minute items into suitcases, no fretting about non-appearance of taxis to the airport, plenty of time to complete the admin of leaving the house in an orderly fashion, with the heating turned down, the lights turned off, the fridge having been run down to a satisfactory minimum.

Great in theory. In practice it means at least an hour sitting and waiting for the taxi with a feeling of slight agitation as you think up last-minute things to worry about. And specifically in my case, the relaxed start delivered a small but telling life lesson which is this: why not have a spare electric toothbrush head permanently resident in your sponge bag, eh? That would mean you wouldn’t forget to bring one because your relaxed departure resulted in slightly too much complacency about having packed the essentials, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

Something of a first-world problem, I realise, but to me the new things one should learn through travelling should be wider cultural issues than discovering how difficult it is to clean one’s teeth with a conventional toothbrush.

Anyhoo.

All the other aspects of the journey to get to New Zealand went very smoothly. The Emirates service was overall superb, and it’s not their fault that it takes 23 hours in the air to get halfway round the globe. As I suspected, I found it quite difficult to find anything among the over 6,500 items on offer as part of their in-flight entertainment that I really wanted to watch. However, I spotted on one screen that there was coverage planned of the T20 World Cup matches.

That’s cricket, in case you need your cultural horizons widened. I searched among their various offerings, but couldn’t find a reference to it anywhere, but spotted someone else watching it and eventually worked out that it was a live broadcast channel. So I was actually able to watch England play cricket in India as I sat in an aeroplane halfway between Dubai and Auckland. Truly, technology is a thing to marvel at.

This is the following match, by the way – Ireland v Sri Lanka

England almost managed to lose their match against Nepal, but won after a thrilling last-over finish. Sam Curran, you are The Man.

Sorry, got carried away there. The rest of the journey was very fine, with lovely food, attentive service and an almost complete lack of sleep for me, but we arrived in good enough order at the Auckland City Hotel, which is not particularly ritzy, but offered us a perfectly decent room which, though unremarkable in most aspects, was outstanding in one.

Check out the tea bags at bottom left. There were big mugs provided, too!

The rooms may be conventional, but the public areas of the hotel are quite funky in their decor,

and it’s located quite near the downtown area. So, having checked in at around 1pm, we went for a walk. Obviously.

Our main objective was to get down to the waterfront where it was a reasonable bet that there would be a good variety of eateries. En route, we passed an impressive-looking church, St. Matthews-in-the-City,

so we looked in.

It’s not a hugely ornate interior, but there’s some decent stained glass, including some lovely modern work.

We pressed on down to the waterfront, which has a pleasant, gentrified air about it,

and found The Conservatory,

which served us a very nice meal, full of tangy Asian-fusion tastes and too large by the amount of one portion of sweet potato fries, the ordering of which was entirely my idea and the source of much regret that we couldn’t do it justice. Afterwards, being stuffed full, it was good to have a reasonable distance to walk back to the hotel, to try to settle what was a lovely but excessive meal. The walk back gave us a chance to see some of the architectural variety on view in Auckland. The city isn’t what I would call a hugely attractive place, but there are some corners where the older buildings have survived the tide of modern steel and glass.

The Ferry Building is an attractive edifice

as is Waitemata train station.

Some of the modern buildings are quite interesting, too.

Thus ended the day, as we found ourselves comprehensively tuckered out when we got back to the hotel. We had enough energy to brew some tea and that was it before we turned in for the night.

Although I was completely knackered – I was within a toucher of collapsing face down on my keyboard as I attempted to edit up some of the photos from the day – I expected that jet lag would prevent me from having a good night’s sleep; my normal experience (particularly when travelling eastwards across time zones) is that I sleep until around 4am and then wake up, completely alert and ready for a day’s activity that isn’t going to start for several hours yet. Last night, however, was not thus plagued. I suffered no major periods of wakefulness, but it was clear from looking at my Garmin Body Battery, a reliable guide to my general state of wellness, that jet lag was going to take its toll for at least another day.

We had paid for a hotel breakfast in advance, which turned out not to have been the best decision; the charitable description of what’s on offer would be “adequate”. But it was sustenance for another day, and so accordingly we set out to discover what further treats Auckland had in store for us.

It has to be said that there’s not a huge amount to see or do in Auckland city. The waterfront that we’d wandered round yesterday is very pleasant, and indeed all of the downtown area is decent enough; but there’s not a huge list of Things To See And Do for the visiting tourist. One thing stands out, literally and figuratively: the Sky Tower.

This was a rather startling demonstration to me of the power of false memory. I have visited Auckland once before, in 1988, and I would have been prepared to swear under oath that I had been up the Sky Tower when I was here last. Since it wasn’t actually opened until 1997, that was patently not the case, and I can’t imagine why I’d thought it was; perhaps I’d just seen photos and conflated it with my experiences of going up similar towers in, for example, Sydney and Toronto. Anyway, having bought tickets online, we blundered about until we found the entrance, and the friendly staff there, in their very striking and colourfully-designed jackets, showed us to the lifts that took us up to the various observation decks on offer. The view is, unsurprisingly, pretty good from up there,

and it’s interesting to see various of the city’s buildings from on high.

St. Matthews-in-the-City
Town Hall
War Museum

It’s possible to bungee jump from high up on the building. We didn’t do that, but, as we sat enjoying a cup of coffee, we also saw that it was possible to walk around the outside.

We didn’t do that, either. I mean, it’s not as if you’re going to get a better view from out there than you can from in here; and you have to get kitted out with jump suits and they won’t let you take your own photos, and so it’s not a prospect that interests me at all. But it was interesting to see others doing it, and there was another cabaret turn going on as well;

the wooden boarding round the building was getting some kind of spray treatment. There was a mystery object, too.

There were supporting stanchions at intervals all around the building, and all of them had an area where a bracket could be bolted on; mysteriously, some of these brackets were missing, but in all cases there was evidence of recent work to excavate a smooth but inexplicable indent in the wood surrounding them. Answers on a postcard, please….

After our sojourn at the Sky Tower, we headed back down towards the waterfront area to take a look at the one other item of interest that Jane had unearthed – the Maritime Museum. This took us past the cathedral, St. Patrick’s. We looked in.

Unusually for a Catholic Church, it’s not sumptuously appointed, but there’s once again some lovely stained glass

but there was an Adoration going on, which meant that I got told off for taking photos, which had the potential to be a distraction for the people there having their spiritual moment. I have to say that in all the Catholic churches I’ve visited – and there have been a few – I have never come across the Adoration before as a formal ritual, so my ignorance rather let me down, I fear. I apologised, of course, but left shortly afterwards, feeling a bit embarrassed.

We made our way to the Maritime Museum and headed for the ticket desk. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but given the fact that New Zealand is made up of islands, one could reasonably hope for an interesting wander round. In the event, serendipity and Jane’s observation skills added a component to the day that was unusual, enjoyable and informative. But first we went into the galleries of the museum. The first area was dedicated to the indigenous history of oceangoing, which was quite considerable and far-ranging.

This being an area unfamiliar beyond having watched both Moana films, there was a lot of interesting content about traditional boat building and sailing. Among the many things I learned from this section of the museum were: the fact that the outrigger of sailing canoes was always to windward (I had previously thought it was to leeward to prevent capsize, but no: it’s there to sit on to provide counter weight to the force of the wind); the fact that outriggers could be sailed in either direction (an outrigger boat with a lateen sail can only go in one direction in any given wind and I wondered what happened if this wasn’t the direction one wanted to go in; the answer is that the yard, from which the lateen sail is hung, can be unshipped from one end of the boat and resettled at the other).

The outrigger sailboat, with lateen sail suspended from a yard

Where the yard meets the deck, it is lashed into a receiving socket. There’s one at the other end of the boat for sailing the other tack

The other, somewhat startling, thing I learned was that there is a tradition of shark-calling. Practitioners could summon a shark by singing a particular melody and thrashing the water with a special shark-calling apparatus made of coconut shells.

This combination would tempt a shark to the surface where it could be captured and eventually killed and eaten. Crikey!

The serendipitous aspect of the museum visit was a short harbour cruise on a sail boat, actually under sail – much more interesting than siting on a boring old motor vessel! The boat in question was the Ted Ashby,

a gaff-rigged ketch, a deck scow, built in Auckland in 1993, a replica of one of the region’s original scow fleet from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (A scow is a flat-bottomed work boat or barge for transporting non-perishable freight.) It was built and named in honour of, surprise, Ted Ashby, a scowman and author who was involved with these and similar boats for most of his adult life. About 20 people at a time can go on board for a one-hour cruise out into the harbour and back. It was a good day for this (not raining, not too windy) and we got some great views of the city skyline and the harbour bridge as we went.

A yacht race was ongoing as we sailed around

The thing that marked the cruise out, apart from the chance to chat with the crew and understand a bit of the history of these boats, was the opportunity for people to help out with the hauling and lowering of the sails.

This replica had an engine, but the boats were originally sail-only and they died out because of the invention and adoption of the internal combustion engine. Nothing to do with putting engines on boats – it was because these engines enabled swift land transport, so the need for the working scows disappeared.

The cruise was a very engaging and interesting way of getting a different view of the city, and once we got back we took a look at the third component of the museum, which was called “Blue Water, Black Magic“, the story of the innovative design, meticulous teamwork and outstanding leadership which led to New Zealand’s international prominence and success in, particularly, the America’s Cup. As well as a huge variety of the smaller dinghies and yachts in New Zealand’s history of sailing, the museum has a couple of the America’s Cup boats which have won them such renown. This is NZL32, the 1995 America’s Cup winner.

Outside the museum is KZ1,

called the Big Boat (no, really?) and a contender for the Cup in 1988. As is common with that particular race, results were often settled in the courtroom rather than on the water, and that year was the subject of a huge amount of litigation about the rules governing the eligibility of boats. These days, there’s much tighter control and less variation between individual boats, but the practical upshot of 1988 was that this Big Boat, the fastest monohull in the world at the time, was comprehensively thrashed by the American entry, which was a catamaran. Any fule kno that a catamaran is vastly quicker than a monohull of comparable size, so there was actually little point in the race taking place at all. Privately, I think that the yanks were so pissed off with losing the 1983 Cup (the first time that America had not won it, despite massive massaging of the rules in their favour) that the 1988 litigation was always likely to end up in an American victory despite what common sense and moral values suggest.

The museum has a replica of the America’s Cup in it, and, tellingly, near it a replica of this replica, made out of plastic from sea-borne rubbish.

After the museum it was time for a late lunch, and Jane had lighted upon an establishment with the unlikely name of Hello Beasty.

It’s another Asian-fusion establishment, and the food was terrific – really tasty and tangy. And they had softshell crabs, so Jane was in heaven. This was an excellent end to a day that turned out to be much more interesting and varied than I had expected.

I’m not quite sure what Auckland has to offer for our second and final day here. Jane has, as ever, been on the lookout for Things To Do, and I guess I’ll find out what they are in due course; I will surely keep you informed.

Preamble: preparing, panicking and packing

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Friday 6 Feb 2025 – Well, we’ve been in the UK now for four whole months! It’s definitely time to be on the move again. We both relaxed easily into a nice comfortable routine at home after our last trip, and there are times when I almost get agitated when considering the upheaval of going away for a period of weeks. This descent into a slough of ease and comfort and stagnation is the first step on a road we don’t want to take. It’s time to shake things up!

To counter the angst of preparation, generally speaking packing for us is a repeatable action, whether we’re going to the equator or the poles – we pack enough for a couple of weeks and pray for decent laundry facilities as we go, merely tailoring the sort of tops we include according to the likely weather.  The outlook for New Zealand is for temperatures in the 20s for the North Island and (hopefully high) teens in the South Island. It’ll almost certainly rain on us at some stage. No particularly specialist gear needed then, as far as clothes are concerned, anyway.

Photographically, I have the usual dilemmas about what to include in my camera bag. I call it a camera bag, but actually photographic equipment seems a minority element, alongside laptop, power banks, WiFi hotspot, backup drive, spare batteries and various other supporting paraphernalia that the well-travelled photo blogger takes with him, and so do I.

The wildlife I might expect to photograph see is in some respects limited compared to other places we’ve visited, in that there are no elusive mammals to seek out. I hope there will be a profusion of bird life and that my photographic skills are up to capturing pictures of a good variety of species. There will likely be whales and seals and dolphins, of course, but unless they get really frisky, I don’t expect these to be that photographically interesting. Who knows, I might even put the camera down and just watch! The Big Lens is clearly going to be a must, but I’m not going to have room for a profusion of other lenses or a tripod; and I’ll take a Small Camera for the sightseeing that doesn’t require a Big Camera. Total weight – 11kg. Please don’t tell the airline.

The destination being New Zealand brings with it some wrinkles before we even get through to the arrivals hall in Auckland. The Powers That Be there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, touchy about what gets brought in case some left-field pathogen escapes and wreaks havoc, so we must be able to prove we have scrubbed our boots so that they are the soles of cleanliness; we must show that our medicines (for one can’t get to our age and mileage without being accompanied by some of them) are legit; and we even have to declare our precious cargo of Twinings finest Earl Grey. Look, I know you can almost certainly buy it over there – they do have shops there, I read about them on the interweb – but there are some chances that are simply not worth taking, OK?

We also have to complete an online declaration of our compliance a maximum of 24 hours before we depart for Auckland. That’ll give us something to do to pass the longueurs of the transit

We have benefited from a slight cock-up on the travel front. The lovely Judy, of Spear Travels, who has done such a marvellous job of pulling together these major trips we’ve been on for the last eight years (eight years! Blimey!), settled on Discover The World to handle the day-to-day details of our itinerary, and a very fine schedule it is, too. But a certain amount of embarrassed shuffling of the feet followed their revelation that they’d missed a booking deadline for our flights, which were originally planned to be on Singapore Airlines, which is a decent operator even if they do shift their deadlines without warning. The practical upshot is that we’re now on Emirates, which I think means we’re slightly ahead on this deal. It’s still 23 hours in the air and arriving, probably sleep-deprived, two days after we set out, whichever aeroplane we’re on.

It’s therefore officially two sleeps before we totter into our hotel in Auckland, but it’ll probably be more like one and a half, given the exigencies of sleeping on a plane.  Still, we’re hoping that we can catch up on some of the films we can’t be bothered to go to see in the UK. According to the Emirates website, we get to choose from “up to 6,500 channels of movies, TV shows, music and games, on demand and in multiple languages”, so, with several hundred movies to choose from, one hopes that boredom is not going to be the main challenge. Even looking through the movie classifications makes me dizzy.

Jane regards any flight which isn’t showing Thor: Ragnarok as a dead loss, so she’ll be quids in. I’ll probably find we’ve arrived before I’ve even finished looking through the choice. Something of a first-world problem; I know I shouldn’t complain.

We will have a couple of days to explore Auckland. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong in the next couple of days, I’ll report back from there.

The two-day journey home

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Tuesday 30 September 2025 – The journey home from near the Ukraine border is not a short one. We discovered that Suceava has an airport, and so I suppose we could have constructed a route home, except (a) WizzAir and (b) Luton Airport. There are some hurdles not worth leaping. Suceava also has a railway station with a direct train to Bucharest, and that was our starting point for a 2-day journey home that was not without its pitfalls, though (spoiler alert) we were only delayed about an hour in our arrival home.

There was basically a choice between two trains, roughly 9am or midday. The journey, though, is nearly seven hours long, and so we opted for the 09:07 train, on the basis that should the Romanian train service cock things up we would at least have a contingency of the later train; and the earlier one would give us a chance to get to Bucharest in late afternoon when we could seek a decent evening meal before overnighting back at the Hotel Minerva.

The lady of the house at Maridor recommended that we start the journey to Suceava at 0730, since it’s about an hour’s drive and it’s no bad thing to have contingency. Privately, I think it also suited her, as it meant that she could drop Vilanel off at school en route.

It continued to be very autumnal as we set out.

We arrived at Suceava station

with about 45 minutes to spare before our train was due.  The inside of the station was not a particularly welcoming environment, with people moodily wiping the floors,

and what seemed like a limited choice of refreshment options.

The departures board showed that our train was on time, and would depart from platform 3, so I thought it might be a good idea to check out the scene and make sure we understood how to get on to the right platform. I managed to find some seats for Jane which were not occupied by deadbeats who had presumably slept the night there, and went out to scout around. At first, it was a bit depressing, as there was actually no indication of which platform was which, although getting from one platform to the next was simple enough – just walk across the track.

The straggly group of people gave me a feeling of which platform we needed to get to; but, more importantly, I discovered that there was a real coffee bar there; a welcome sight.

We got ourselves outside a coffee and bought sandwiches for the journey; there being a mini-mart next door, we got some fruit to accompany them. At the appointed hour, our train turned up

and we took our appointed seats, in first class, of course, dahling.

For me, the journey passed uneventfully – we had cellular coverage for most of it, so I read the papers for pretty much the entire journey. Jane took a more lively interest in what we were passing and some photographs of it: several ghastly communist-era buildings, many of which looked abandoned;

plenty of agriculture;

some modern infrastructure;

and, accompanying us for much of our journey, a massive road development, which will presumably be lovely when it’s finished, and ease the journey between Bucharest and parts north.

It was nearly 4pm when we arrived at Bucharest and everyone streamed off the train

and on to a busy station concourse.

Everything had gone smoothly thus far, and we encountered the first wrinkle in our travel when we tried to get into the metro to get to our hotel. We’d kept our cards from our previous time in the city and they were in theory good for several more metro journeys. Well, Jane’s was; mine, however, had magnetically given up the ghost, so I had to bumble about getting myself another one; hardly an imposition, but not welcome when blundering about with a suitcase in tow.

It was comforting to know that our room in the Hotel Minerva should include something almost more important than a bed and bedding – a kettle and a fridge. En route back, I popped into a Carrefour Express and got some milk, and once we’d checked in,

we could indulge ourselves in a mug of Twinings finest Earl Grey, which was very welcome.

Vlad the lad was on reception at the hotel. I’d been hoping that we might catch him having a crafty cigarette outside the hotel, in which case he would, of course, have been Vlad the Inhaler, but it was not to be.  He booked us a transfer to the airport for the following morning and we headed out to eat. Being creatures of habit, and having enjoyed our meal there before, we headed back to Hanul Manuc.  This was now 5.30 in the afternoon, and there was obviously Something Going On at the St. Anthony Church, as there was a massive queue to get in. It sounded as if a service was being relayed outside the church, so I suppose that’s where people were headed.

Hanul Manuc was exactly as before, except, since it was getting cool as the sun went down, blankets were provided for them as wanted.

There were more cats in attendance on this occasion, too.

We had another good meal there and, importantly, some of their rather nice apricot palinka (fruit liqueur); we’d sampled others up north,  but they were much coarser. Having eaten, we decided that we should seek out a bottle to take home with us, just in case it turned out to be the exception to the rule that local booze never travels well. As we emerged from Hanul Manuc at 7pm, I was astonished to see that the queue for the church had, if anything, got longer.

We found a shop which sold us some of the palinka (about half the price it would have cost in the UK), and peeked in through the netting surrounding Vlad’s castle as we headed back to the metro.

Thus ended the day, and we had to head to bed early, as the alarm was set for 0430 (ugh!), to get us to the airport in time for an 0825 flight.

Wednesday 1 October 2025 – We duly got up and were ready to leave the hotel (with the packed breakfast that they’d created for us). This is the point at which the first unexpected setback happened – our transfer didn’t turn up, which is not the start that we wanted. After fifteen anxious minutes, I got the hotel to order us a cab, which (a) turned up promptly and (b) got us to the airport for about a third of the price of the hotel transfer service.

We went into the terminal building, which is not in terrifically good shape, truth be told,

and stared at the Departures screen

which had a gap against the BA check-in entry. We tried not to worry that we should somehow magically know where to go, and we spent half an hour staring at the screen, willing a check-in area to appear, whilst around our entry all the other flights appeared to be operating OK. I consulted the BA website, which showed that the departure time for our flight was unchanged at 0825 – but the arrival time was listed as being 30 minutes late. We resigned ourselves to standing there until the gods of international flight decided that we could proceed, and eventually our check-in desk number appeared on the screen, so we rushed off, dropped our bags and went through security.

It was a bus ride to the aeroplane, but apart from that the flight proceeded smoothly. We even got free hot water and milk from the cabin staff so we could make our own tea – I happened to have a couple of Twinings finest Earl Grey teabags about my person, you understand. The plane took off a bit late but landed exactly on schedule, so why there had been notice of a delay is a mystery that will never satisfactorily be resolved.

The next wrinkle in the travel came as we got into the arrivals hall at Terminal 3 to find that no taxi was there to pick us up. The driver eventually called me to say that traffic was really bad but he’d be there as soon as he could. So we went and got ourselves a coffee and chatted with a lady who was similarly  awaiting a delayed taxi. Something Was Definitely Afoot – I could see that there was congestion all around the airport. Our driver turned up – having taken over an hour to get from Terminal 5 to Terminal 3 – and we discovered what the issue was as he went to pay for his parking. There had been a major fire in the tunnel that leads to the terminal buildings, which is obviously going to cause ructions. To be fair, Heathrow responded by opening all the barriers at the car park, so we didn’t have to pay for parking there.

In the end, we arrived home only about an hour later than we might have expected and it was sweet indeed to be able to put ourselves outside some more of Twinings finest Earl Grey before getting round to the unpacking and laundry.

That was the end of our two-day journey to get home, and we once again reflected on what a great experience the last fortnight had been. Would we recommend it to others? Yes and no, is the answer. The monasteries are absolutely worth travelling to see, assuming you like That Kind Of Thing; but the walking between them was pretty unrewarding. I would recommend rather that people fly to Suceava and rent a car to get around; less healthy exercise, maybe, but more efficient use of time and greater flexibility. However, we’re both profoundly glad that we’ve been able to see the monasteries and experience some rural Romanian culture and hospitality.

Th-th-th-that’s all for now, folks. Once again, these pages will go dark for a few months until our next holiday travels. I hope you’ve subscribed so that you’ll be able to join us when we leave these shores once again. Bye-bye for now.