Around the Town

Tēnā koutou!  That's Maori for hello. Maggie here.

After so many weekends of driving to the surrounding areas of Auckland, we decided we needed a weekend in town exploring Auckland's neighborhoods.  There are many lovely neighborhoods, most of which are on the coast.  When you live in a city with as many inlets and bays as Auckland, the chances of your neighborhood touching water is pretty high.

Saturday we decided to walk around the neighborhood of Devonport.  It's one of the 'fancy' neighborhoods with streets of cute cafes, well-maintained parks packed with children, and upscale housing that actually have yards larger than postage stamps.

Kiwi houses are practically built on top of one another.  When you walk down the street you will frequently see three driveways in a row.  One leads to the house closest to the street, another leads to the house directly behind it, and the third to a house behind that.  So the streets are pretty far apart, houses are crammed together, and yards are pretty dinky.  I don't know what in their history prompted this housing style, but there it is.  Auckland is also extremely hilly, so some of these driveways are INTENSE.  They are lucky they don't get snow here because Aucklanders (Aucklandites?) would be in trouble.  We are talking steep.  The front fender of our car scrapes every time we pull into our driveway because of the sharp curve combined with the steep incline.

Some of the tallest isolated hills in Auckland are in Devonport, so the views are 360.  This made them ideal for lookout posts and disappearing guns in WWII.  One of the original guns in still in place and you can walk through some of the underground tunnels, barracks, and kitchen during certain hours.

North Head Hill:

3D map of Devonport

3D map of Hauraki Gulf (encompassing Greater Auckland)

James and I ate lunch at the top.

Well, I ate lunch and James slobbered on my wrapper.  Mmm, crinkly.

Mount Victoria:

Old bunker vents are decorated like mushrooms all over the top of the hill.

Sunday we went to the other side of the bay to the neighborhoods of Mission Bay and St. Heliers.  There is a long waterfront walk that connects all the neighborhoods in that area, and also passes by several yachting clubs and the aquarium.  Boating clubs are very popular with the tweenagers here (from what I've observed) so many times when we pass by a yacht club (they're everywhere here) there are little clusters of sailfish playing follow the leader.  We've watched them come in before and it's fun to see how the boats break down and transport.  My parents gave Lance a yacht club membership for his birthday, so we need to find a yacht club close by.  They aren't exclusive and highfalutin like in the States.  Pretty much every neighborhood that touches water has one.  We've been told most of the clubs rent out the little sailfish for $5-10 to members.  Score!  We've also been told about something called the Rum Races, but that will be a different story for another day.

This picture doesn't look like much, but the trees lining the whole path were beautiful!

We have to appreciate the beauty of the city itself, not just it's surrounding areas.  No complaints here!