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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.