Tag Archives: History

Arrival to Auckland

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Tuesday 10 February 2026 – 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.

Raining in our expectations

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Monday 29 September 2025 – Today was our last monastery. You’ll probably be glad, having been assailed by multiple images of multiple frescoed walls and ceilings, but stick with me one last time, eh?

The monastery, Voroneț monastery, is about 10km from the Humor monastery, i.e. about 12km from Maridor, where we’re staying. The original idea, as positied in our itinerary, was to be driven over there and to walk back. Given that we awoke to a damp, dismal day, with the prospect of rain for quite a bit of it, this plan didn’t appeal. We agreed with the lady of the house that we would be driven over there and also get a lift back.

After doing battle with a less-than-satisfactory shower which dispensed only less-than-hot water, we had a late breakfast. It was an ample meal, bearing considerable evidence of its rural roots – fried eggs, copious amounts of two sorts of cheese, meatballs, small cocktail-sized sausages, something that Julia the previous evening had described as buttermilk but which was more akin to a thin, somewhat fizzy yoghurt, bread and butter, plum jam and mashed avocado. We managed to get hot water for our tea, so we were well fed up by 10am, when the man of the house came to take us to the monastery. It was raining really quite hard at this point, and, rather engagingly en route, he picked up an elderly chap who was walking to town (a 7km journey) and dropped him off at the pharmacy. Then he took us to the monastery and, to our surprise, told us he’d wait whilst we looked around. This saved us the bother of working out how to get picked up and we were correspondingly grateful.

So: the monastery. It was constructed by Stephen the Great in 1488 over a period of 3 months and 3 weeks to commemorate the victory at Battle of Vaslui. Its walls weren’t painted until 1547, but they obviously did a bang up job, because the monastery has in its time been called the “Sistine Chapel of the East” for its vivid frescoes, which feature an intense shade of blue known in Romania as “Voroneț blue.”

However.

This is what you see as you walk in through the gate.

It’s a sad sight, not too surprising, I suppose. The monastery was deserted soon after 1775, when the Habsburg monarchy annexed the northern part of Moldavia and the monks only returned to Voroneț in 1991. It’s amazing, really, that those frescoes on the other side of the building have survived as well as they have.

The frescoes on the flat wall at the end of the monastery building also have survived well.

The story of the Last Judgement depicted on this wall seems to be similar to that on the narthex at Humor. (Voroneț came first – Ed)

Inside, as usual there was a prohibition on photography, but again, some others were taking  pictures, so I followed suit, as the interior is, like the others, a thing of joy.

For some reason, there was a seismograph installation in the church.

So there it was – our final monastery.

It was still raining as we went outside to be driven back to Maridor. The weather relented occasionally later and enabled Jane to get a couple of non-spattered views across the countryside from our room,

but the weather was too unreliable to risk going out for a walk and disturbing all the neighbourhood dogs, so we spent the rest of the day in sloth, drinking tea and sustaining ourselves with the delicious fudge-like something-or-other that we’d bought at Pasul Palma.

On this trip, we have now visited four of the six or seven painted monasteries of Bucovina which have UNESCO World Heritage status. The frescoed exteriors all date from the 1500s and of course show various levels of deterioration due to the effects of the weather (generally affecting one side more than the others), deficiencies of technique and degree of upkeep. Looking at them in chronological order:

Humor: one of the oldest, it was founded by Prince Petru Rares and painted in 1530. It is known for the rich red pigments but has deteriorated badly on one side.

Moldovița: also founded by Petru Rares and painted in 1532.

Voroneț: built by Stephen the Great in 1488 but not painted until 1547, it was deserted for 200 years between 1774 and 1991and fell into disrepair, hence the considerable deterioration.

Sucevița: founded by the Movilă family and painted in 1581, Sucevița was the last and is considered the finest of them all. Techniques of painting and upkeep had improved over the fifty years since Humor; the monastery was in a sheltered position and was additionally protected by high fortress walls, and as a result it is possible to get an inkling of how spectacular these monasteries must have looked 500 years ago!

We’ve therefore done what we set out to do – a short exploration of the country’s capital, a little hiking in the Carpathian mountains and a visit to probably the best-preserved of the Painted Monasteries. En passant, we’ve also learned a lot of the history of the country, both ancient and modern, seen a variety of its vistas and cultures, enjoyed meeting its people and feel we appreciate the place somewhat more than we did before we first came. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky with the weather, found gin and tonic in most places and didn’t run out of Twinings finest Earl Grey at any point – a most satisfactory set of achievements all round.

All we have to do now is to get home, a process which will take more than one day. The theory goes that we catch a train tomorrow for the six-hour train journey to Bucharest, overnight in Bucharest and finish by taking a ridiculously early flight back to Blighty. Wish us luck.

Suceviţa – a long walk to a dramatic reveal

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Friday 26 September 2025 – The day dawned bright and cold. Accuweather swore blind that the temperature hit freezing point overnight, but promised termperatures into double figures – just – by the end of a sunny day. We decided to head out on today’s walk at around 10am and headed down to breakfast, which, as yesterday was ample and tasty. The hotel is really quite large, as evidenced by the fact that they had a 50-strong coach party in on the day we arrived. However, they departed (praise be) and for at least one of the nights we’ve stayed here we were the only guests, which is a slightly weird experience. The staff seem to number about four, which is fine if you’re the only guests, but I hope they’re going to gear up a bit for the tours which we were told they’re expecting over the coming days. The hotel is a bit dowdy, but the food has been very good and the service very friendly, if not really Anglophone in any real sense of the word. English she is not spoke so very much in the hotel, but smiling, nodding and pointing at things kept our use of Google Translate to a minimum.

Leaving breakfast, we were accosted by a gent, speaking French, who asked us if we were headed to Casa Felicia. We were, and it turned out that he was the proprietor and had come to pick up our bags, so we quickly went and got them for him.

Our destination today was in Suceviţa, a walk of anything between 16 and 18km, depending on whose information you consulted. All sources, however, were united in setting expectations – a gentle rise and fall, but with a steep lump in the middle. Garmin plotted the course like this.

Using the Garmin data, ChatGPT told me that the gradient in the Lump was a stretch of one kilometre up a slope of one in six – quite steep. So one possible course of action would have been to be given a lift with our bags. But we squared our shoulders and headed forth on foot.

The route was described in our information as “the monk’s path” between the monasteries of Putna and Suceviţa. It was also on an established route, the Via Transylvanica. A fellow hiker (and subscriber to these pages), Ian, tells me that this is a 1500km hike across Romania, which he was now contemplating doing in a mere two months, a feat well beyond Jane and me. It’s exceedingly, possibly even excessively, well-marked

and these marks are accompanied by others, too.

Various searches suggest that the “m” is for “monastery” – specifically an indication of the route to the Suceviţa monastery. So that was encouraging. We saw the blue plus sign a lot as well, but I haven’t managed to find out which route it was the waymark code for. Whatever, the route led out of town on a concrete road

which led past kilometre posts for the Via Transylvanica.

Jane found out that there would be one of these approximately every kilometre, each with its own artwork on it, so we have a lot of photos of them; take it from me, they were there.

Soon, the concrete road turned into a forest track

but there continued to be facilities set up for people walking the route

although some needed a little attention, maybe.

Forest track it may have been, but it still led past posh properties with their own posh portals

and posh fences.

The going got wilder

and it was clear that there was a huge amount of logging traffic along the track. There was also evidence of horse traffic (we saw one cart being used to transport chopped up logs), and one could see from the hoofprint that the horseshoes actually had spikes to help with traction.

The heavy logging traffic meant that the going was quite muddy at times, and the track gradually increased in steepness as we went along;

There were watch towers at intervals,

we guessed to be able to look out for fires during the dry seasons. We also learned the Romanian for “Buen Camino”.

Eventually, the gradual increase in steepness became an extreme increase – we’d reached The Lump!

It was very steep in places

but, as you can see from the photos, the going underfoot was OK – not stony, slippery or treacherous, so actually the stiff pull up for the next kilometre was hard work but not at all daunting, as the hike out of Bran had been.

We reached the high point without incident and the track started back down again, at first gently,

and then not gently.

but again the going was largely good, just rather muddy in places, exacerbated by the tyres of the many mountain bikers who clearly use this track for some perverse kind of entertainment. The track levelled out, following the river

and then we reached the other side, where it again became forestry track.

Because we’d done The Exciting Bit, the track became a rather dull slog. Truth be told, the walk as a whole, with the exception of The Lump, was just a walk along a rather unvarying and not very interesting forestry track. But never mind, we’d made it.

Suceviţa, when we got there, was not dissimilar to Putna, in the very attractive houses to be seen.

Some were older and more traditional,

some more modern and ambitious.

Eventually, and to my relief, we reached a coffee bar and stopped for refreshments just outside the principal building in Suceviţa,

the monastery. We’d made good time, and so decided we’d go in and take a look rather than head off immediately to our accommodation. This monastery is different from the previous ones we’d visited in a couple of respects, the most immediate one being that they charge you to go in – 10 lei (about €2) per person. So you pay your money and walk through, and this is what lies within.

 

The outside is painted – we’d reached the first of the Painted Monasteries, which were actually the main reason we’d come all this way. Jane had seen a photo and on the strength of it we’d travelled to see some of these beautifully decorated buildings. The Suceviţa monastery is possibly the finest of them – and it indeed has a beautiful exterior.

Why the difference between this and, say, Putna monastery, which is imposing but plain on the outside? The Putna building predates the others, before the fashion developed to paint the outside. The frescoes of biblical scenes painted on the outside were a source of devotional inspiration to the largely illiterate villagers, and were also a visible declaration of Orthodox faith, resisting pressure from Ottoman, Protestant and Catholic neighbours.

The church is in a beautiful (and well-fortified) courtyard, too.

Going into the church,

past the graffiti of the centuries

you reach an impressive narthex,

which is rapidly followed by photographically a bitter disappointment. Photography inside the church is not allowed and there was a nun of very severe disposition there to enforce the ban. Actually, I could possibly have snuck a phone picture or two, but Jane gave me One Of Her Looks, so I didn’t. I had to content myself to what you can photograph from the door.

I find it ceaselessly annoying to have to pay to enter somewhere, only to find that photography is limited. They have their reasons, I suppose, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it and it left a sour taste in my mouth.  We tried to find an official book of photos of the inside – one standard tactic of milking the punters – and went into the shop. But the demeanour of the nun there made us feel we were invading her privacy, so we left.  Again, I suppose they have their reasons and want to maintain dignity, but I’d like to think that we were trying to make a contribution and were simply being rebuffed, and not with good grace.

Anyhoo…

We walked the half-kilometre or so to our accommodation and found it to be utterly charming, a green lawn surrounded on three sides by individual traditional houses making up the accommodation.

A guard cat was, as ever, on duty.

Our room looks comfortable and any autumn chill will be dispersed at the hands of its mighty heater.

The lady of the house made us welcome with tea and cake in the family dwelling making up the fourth side of the square. She, like her husband who transferred our bags, speaks French as her second language; this is what they learned at school, although these days English is taught. Jane’s expert French, from having lived in Paris, came in handy, and we established that dinner would be at 7pm, and would be with the other guests of the place. We met two of them in passing; they were two English ladies whom we had actually first seen in Putna, and so we knew we’d have some English conversation at dinner time.

As it happens, the other two guests were English as well, so Julia and Heather, Jeanette and her son Ian and we had a very congenial evening eating the delicious food cooked by Madame, making our way through a bottle of a rather tasty and fairly fiery apple liqueur, and talking mainly about our various travel experiences, both in Romania and elsewhere.

So now you know about the Painted Monasteries and have seen photos of one of them, possibly the most imposing of the lot. Tomorrow, we will be taken to visit another, in Moldovita, which should take up half the day. The other half is unprogrammed; one option is a scramble up a hill to see a view of the Suceviţa monastery from on high, but mere sloth is a possibility, too. We’ll have to see how the day pans out.