One Day in Auckland

General observations:
The soil is just like in Hawaii, brown and volcanic and sticky. The grass grows just on the top of the soil and is crunchy like the grass in Hawaii.
The flora is tropical and I don't recognize all the trees but they feel like Hawaii too.
It is about like July in Maine here, according to the calendar and the latitude. So it is hot but not too hot, and everyone is behaving like it is summer.
Every person we have encountered has a lovely New Zealand accent and is very helpful and friendly.
This is a multi-cultural city with people from this side of the world -- mostly Pacific Island and Chinese/Japanese/Korean plus Maori and European.
Lots and lots of interesting food from all around this side of the Pacific.
There is one particular flower in bloom that we haven't yet had a chance to photograph, but it is blue and perennial and looks sort of like cleome but not with pokies. I will find out the name.
Our host had Marmite out for breakfast, in addition to muesli.
The streets and towns have British and Maori names, all mixed together depending on who got to name it first. The non-British words look Hawaiian.
The only thing that really stresses me is sitting in the passenger seat on the left side of the car and feeling like the driver is over-compensating and driving on the extreme left, endangering the passenger and the left mirror. But of course nothing bad happened, it's just a scary place to be, on the left with no steering wheel.
Auckland reminds us of Seattle, in terms of architecture and plants and water everywhere and possibly the general age of the city.
I have been alert to see if I hear American accents and I am pretty sure I haven't heard one.

Very neat and tidy house -- our room on the left. No problems.

We woke up early, considering that we had only gone to sleep at 2 AM, Hawaii time.  But the sun was up at 6:00 and it felt like it was time to get up.  We arrived at The Museum (a very large Greek edifice at the top of a hill, with a grand view of Auckland and the surrounding bay) at about 9:30, half an hour before opening time.  This is the first museum we have ever encountered that opened early, just because. Where we come from that would never happen.

The moa, a little scary.

The museum had one floor for the backstory of Polynesian cultural beginnings (much like the Bishop Museum in Hawaii), the next floor up was natural history and the top floor was New Zealand in various wars.  This island has only been inhabited for about 800 years, which makes it one of the very last places on the planet to house humans.  It was home to the explorers who eventually made their way here, establishing yet another language and culture in the Pacific. In the natural history rooms we learned about all the birds that lived here before mammals arrived. The most amazing one is the moa, a huge ostrich-like bird -- the only wingless bird ever. Its bones were huge and heavy.  It is extinct but it would be quite something to see one of those in real life. We saw what a kiwi looks like (a fluffy sort of puffball with a very long pointy bill).  We thought of our nephews Mark and Brian and how many birds there are to still see out here on these islands. The top floor was lots of information and artifacts about all the wars that New Zealanders have participated in.  Too many. It is a high price to pay for wanting to be part of the world.  As always, we were glad to get that orientation before we started our random tour of this country. We like to get the background information wherever we go.

Oh, there was a whole section about volcanoes. Very detailed, very gruesome in some ways. Lots of science about how they work and why. They are really the reason we still have enough carbon dioxide to keep alive, so they are doing us all a lot of good. There was a whole display on the ten ways you could die from a volcano.  And there were some amazing stories of survival.  In 1982 there was a British Airways passenger jet that flew over a volcano (Mount Galungung) that had erupted, but the crew did not know that had happened, and all four of the engines died. The pilots had no idea what was going on, but they put out a reassuring message to their passengers and then they tried to figure out what to do.  As the plane fell to lower altitudes, eventually one and then all of the engines started again before they crashed. They landed, with some more complications, and no one died. The windows of the airplane were scraped so badly by volcanic ash that it was impossible to see out, and the instrument landing system was inoperable. One of the pilots sat on an armrest and peered out of a tiny place in the window that was not scratched. There was also this room that was set up like a living room and you sit on the couches and look out the front window at a view of the bay.  There is a newscast on the TV talking about the possibility of an imminent eruption, and then the volcano in the window erupts and the TV shuts off and then there is this terrible view of a huge black wave coming toward the window and then the room shakes like an earthquake. Whew. These people have a different reality to endure. Basically if they don't get enough warning and evacuate the region, everyone dies.

After that we went through the wharf area of downtown -- lots of construction and traffic -- and didn't stop there. It was touristy but also full of real businesses and work.  A huge crew ship was right there, and somewhere there was the yacht that won the America's Cup but we didn't identify it as we inched through the streets, focusing on all those left turns and roundabouts.

Maybe the America's Cup yacht, being towed so fast it is up on its foils.

We were aiming for the North Head, a point at the end of a peninsula that faces Auckland from across the bay.  First we stopped to pick up some fish and chips and then we stopped at a local beach called Northern Neck. There we had a picnic and watched children playing in the water -- there was a camp that was for learning to boogie board. Jon and I agreed that it looked like all camps: trying to find organized ways to use up time and keep the kids entertained. Lots of running into the water, diving in and swimming about ten feet, returning to the beach, and running back out, as a race.  Pointless but entertaining.  It was sunny and lovely.

The North Head was a familiar place, as we have visited many such spots with bunkers and places for big guns, as they watch out for enemies during war. Diamond Head is the most like it, but there are many others: Gibraltar, Dover, even north of Bethany in NJ.  We climbed to the top of the hill and looked at the view from all sides.  There was a beach below that was super shallow -- people walked out in ankle deep water for a very long way. On the hill, there were kids sliding down the steep grassy slope on cardboard, having no snow or any possibility of snow ever. (More like Seattle than Maine.)

Guns to the left with Auckland across the bay.

All that bay, inside the trees, is no deeper than your knees.

We had dinner at a food court that offered all sorts of Asian dishes -- we opted for Malaysian.  My laksa was soupier than I remembered from the last time (in Amsterdam) but the flavor was wonderful: coconut cream, mildly spicy.

Eight different stalls with all drinks sold at a single counter.

After dinner we looked at the map to see how easy it would be to get out of the city for a bit, since it wouldn't get dark until about 9:00. We happened to choose a route that got us into horse and cow and sheep country as soon as we got out of the suburbs. And the terrain was very much like the Shire in The Hobbit (which I just read,  to be ready for this landscape). It was steeply hilly, rounded and green, stunning in its contrasts of sheep-clipped grass and big hedges, as far as you could see.  We went through a little town that had signs saying it was an artist town, but it was all asleep by the time we passed through. I yelled at Jon constantly to say away from the ditch on the left, and stop turning on the windshield wipers all the time. He did everything just fine, and we were both very glad to have a navigation system in the car so I wouldn't have to look at his phone and try to direct without benefit of wifi. That is a disaster.