Before I start talking about the day, a few words about our hotel, the Auckland City Hotel on Hobson St. It's a perfectly fine hotel (not sure it's a proper four stars like they claim, but certainly 3-3.5), and very reasonably priced (coming out comparable or cheaper than hostels would have). It's just a little...weird. It seems to be run by a company that is also affiliated with a ministry (evidenced by the Bible quotation by the elevator) as well as a tech consultancy. Seen from the Sky Tower, the building looks huge, but internally it's laid out a bit weird, and there doesn't seem to be that much accessible space. The windows in the rooms are incredibly drafty for modern construction (they're worse than the ancient wood-frame windows of my apartment back home), but they compensate for this by adding heavy curtains and putting TWO space heaters in the room (I can't imagine the electric bills in this place). The remote works, but doesn't seem to control the TV. The staff were friendly and helpful (though they charged me NZD 35 a night for a sofabed that I suspect was going to be in the room anyway), and none of these things were showstoppers; they're just...weird.
Anyway, last night I was feeling sick and tired again, so instead of going out, we went to the Malaysian restaurant in the hotel. It was good, but nothing particularly special.
Today our plan was to visit the Auckland War Memorial Museum before picking up the car nearby at 4. This left us plenty of time for a late start, so we watched some Olympics and checked out around 11. Grabbed some döner kebabs on the way to the sci-fi themed movie theater on Queen St. The theater has cool architecture (all 50s swoopy rocket stuff inside) and can be taken in in under five minutes -- which we did, and continued east towards the Domain park.
In the park, we dawdled around the Wintergarden for a while. It has two greenhouses, one for moderate and one for tropical climates, and has a nice collection of flowers and fruits (including some interestingly shaped chili peppers -- it is left as an exercise to the reader to find the appearance of the Peter's Pecker pepper).
After the Wintergarden, we walked a few minutes over to the Auckland Museum. We took a while to get here (finally arriving around 1 or so) because I figured that it would only take a few hours to get through the exhibits. Boy, was I wrong. The Auckland War Memorial Museum is really big, with three floors containing dramatically different exhibits. Half of the ground floor is dedicated to Māori and Pacific exhibits; the rest had varied exhibits on topics ranging from design to old musical instruments to wildlife photography. I didn't even make it to the second floor, but I'm told it has natural history exhibits. Finally, the third floor, which I had to race through in a half hour, has exhibits on the various wars in which New Zealand has taken part, both domestic and foreign.
The Māori exhibits on the ground floor are really interesting and give a good background for someone with no background on the Māori or their history. There's a huge selection of wood carvings and even a couple entire buildings located inside.
While we were at the museum, we also took the opportunity to see a Māori cultural show, exhibiting traditional song, dance, and games. Of course, the highlight was the haka dance:
After the Māori galleries, I spent quite a while going through the wildlife photography exhibit. This shark has the world's happiest fish-hook-related deformity:
Finally, I realized that I was running out of time, so I headed upstairs to the war exhibits. I'm pretty much a sucker for WW2 exhibits, especially the propaganda posters.
Mechanical things are also a weakness of mine, so seeing fully restored Spitfire and Zero fighters was awesome!
After the museum, we walked over to the car rental to pick up our ride for the next few days, a red Toyota Corolla hatchback. Shamefully, I went for the automatic version; I figured trying to change gear with the wrong hand while also paying attention to driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time might be a little much. Happily, driving on the highway isn't all that different here, and about two and a half hours after leaving Auckland, we arrived at our motel in Te Kuiti.
Should've opted for the stick. NZ roads are fun. They run the Rally of NZ (WRC event) on public, gravel roads.
ReplyDeleteThe Auckland Museum is probably my favourite museum there. MOTAT is a close second. I hope you'll get a chance to visit there.