Auckland

This morning, which is still last night for many of us, we boarded our bus for a tour of Auckland, New Zealand's largest city.  About one-third of New Zealanders (who do, in fact, call themselves Kiwis) live here, with the rest of the country being largely rural with a scattering of smaller cities.

We zipped past this McDonald's on the way to our first stop.  Like everywhere else in the world, McDonald's and Starbucks are ubiquitous.  Still, there's a local accent:  I don't recall seeing lamb on McDonald's stateside menu.

Auckland is a busy port city on an isthmus of land on the North Island.  It has two harbors, one each side of the isthmus.  I was told that a journey by sea between the two harbors would be 700 miles, around the northern end of the North Island.

There are bays and inlets all over, with lots of pleasure boating in addition to the commercial traffic.  These boathouses date from the early 20th century and are now protected as historic buildings.

Our first stop was the Michael Joseph Savage memorial in a park overlooking the main harbor. Savage was an early labor leader and politician.

Visible from the park, and in fact visible from most places in Auckland, is Sky Tower. It resembles Seattle's Space Needle and Berlin's Fernsehturm television tower.  Sky Tower is 328 m (1028 ft) tall, and is the tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere.  Dinner tonight is in a restaurant near the top.

The tower makes a popular background for photos, as some in our group demonstrated.

 A view of the harbor from the park.

This combination Thai restaurant and Starbucks was across the street at our next stop, which was a park at sea level with a fine beach.

The beach itself.  The hill in the distance is the remains of an ancient volcano; such volcanic hills are all over Auckland.

One couple on our tour brought along an amazing zoom lens for their camera.  Here they're using it to capture an extreme close-up of a bird in the tree.

Lots of cameras on this trip, everything from cellphones and iPads to DSLRs.  Here's a shot of a person taking a shot of a person taking a shot of ...  This could go on forever.

An unabashed fast-food joint.

We visited Auckland's rose garden.  Think Portland's International Rose Test Garden, only a bit smaller.

Everyone with a camera was taking pictures of the roses.

As I said, the Sky Tower is visible from almost everywhere in Auckland.

Another garden, this time the Winter Garden with a large greenhouse for orchids and other tropical plants.

A parade of disabled children in wheelchairs visiting the garden.

We ate lunch in and wandered around in the town of Devonport, an upscale neighborhood on the harbor.  Several of us found ice cream.

Coffee is a big deal here.  Our guide considers Starbucks to be coffee for "introducing teenagers to coffee," and that serious adults should drink real coffee.  This comes from individual coffee shops that aren't part of chains.

Some random observations along the streets of Devonport.  First is a book entitled "Modes and Manners of the XIX Century", in four volumes.  I didn't ask the price.

The place to go for hats in Devonport seems to be the pharmacy.

How upscale is it?  Well, this smallish-looking house goes for a million and a half dollars.  At that price, the fact that NZ dollars are worth slightly less than US dollars doesn't make much difference.

An expensive chocolate store.

This fellow was working in a boat factory, really a small shop that makes one-of-a-kind boats.

The two pots on the right sell for NZ $2298 for the pair.

After lunch we took the ferry across the harbor back to the city of Auckland proper.

This beautiful yacht passed us and headed out to sea.

Approaching the ferry dock in the city.

Dinner was in a restaurant near the top of the Sky Tower, seen here from the base.  We decided that the tower resembled an old Soviet rocket, with its splayed legs at the base.

This is a shot of one of the tower's promotional posters in the lobby.  People wearing safety harnesses can go out on an unprotected platform with no railing.  What's more, they can bungee jump from the tower.  We didn't see any of that going on.  The tower is about 1000 feet high, to the top of the antenna.  I don't know how high the bungee jumping platform or the restaurant is.

We had excellent views of the harbor through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows of the restaurant.  There are lots of pleasure boats in Auckland.

We had tables adjacent to the windows.  These are high dynamic range images, in order to keep the people from being too dark and the scene outside from being too light.  The price for that is colors that don't look quite natural.

A sample of the offerings at the buffet.

Jack Allen photo

A beautiful sunset after dinner.

Christa called in an Audio Postcard from the observation deck of the sky tower.  A crowd gathered to listen to her.

Jack Allen photo

Once the sun is down, the city appears almost magical from the sixty-third story.

As I prepared the blog entry, I listened to All Classical via the internet.  I seemed to be the only one listening from New Zealand at that time of the night.  The global reach of All Classical is pretty amazing.

Working on the blog in the hotel lounge, where the WiFi internet worked much better than it did in the rooms.

Jack Allen photo

Tomorrow we tour outside the city and spend the night in small groups with several farm families.