Seven Stops in New Zealand: Day 7 - Auckland

Auckland! Auckland! Land of Aucks. What is an Auck anyway? Doesn’t matter. We’re in Auckland!

Feeling a little discombobulated due to the cold medication swilling around in my system, we set out in scattered clouds, or scattered sunshine, depending on how you look at it. We had a good old stomp around the harbour area of the city: the old Ferry Building, the old Customs House, the not so old coffee shop Ronnies where we had a coffee and I introduced Beasy to Lammingtons. These are soft squares of vanilla cake, covered with chocolate which is itself covered with coconut. My first Lammington was in Va’vau, Tonga in 1989, at a bakery just up from the market. We had never heard of them before but became fast friends of the little things and ate them wherever we found them.

They are now common in both Australia and New Zealand bakeries and cafes, but had escaped our perambulations until today, and we chose a great big one. It’s not actually the most stunning confection you will have ever tasted, but it is tasty, and that’s enough.

We checked out the Maritime Museum and a few of the shops then went back to the ship to divest ourselves of packages and found our confiscated wine from Melbourne had been delivered to our room so we could pack it up. Well it wasn’t good enough to take home, we knew that when we bought it, so we popped it open and had a glass in defiance of the Holland America parent company’s policy. The $18US corkage we would have been charged was more than the wine cost, or was worth, and I’ve been able to smuggle onboard the 4 wines we are able to take back to Canada and earned the respect of my mother in the meantime – worth the price of admission.

Tomorrow we leave the ship and sleep on land for the first time in 6 weeks, so we are packing up and worried about whether what we added would fit into our cases. It looks like we will be ok, and besides we have two more days here to figure things out. Beasy is trying to see if she can fit her little white bed into her suitcase and will no doubt miss it more than anything we’ve seen or experienced. She’s trying to come up with a business idea that includes providing a bed with a soft top, the rocking motion of being on a ship and having it turned down with a chocolate every night. Every night she hears it calling her name and gives herself utterly to the pleasure of lying in its softness, cradling her through the night. We had hoped to have even rougher seas, but have had to accept gentle rocking and the odd shudder instead of anything more dynamic.

In the afternoon we took the ferry across the harbour to Devonport, and sauntered past the cafes, book stores and pubs, admiring the wonderful old villas that look across at the lights of the flashy city and its busy docks. We saw magnificent sailing boats, real racers, along with smaller sailing vessels, speed boats, fishing boats and kayaks, all out on a Sunday afternoon. We sat under a tree and ate tip top ice cream cones until the wind picked up enough to turn us homeward. 

Bizarrely, New Zealand celebrates Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of a day a group of angry Catholics tried to blow up the British Parliament in 1605, the failed "gunpowder plot". In England, children traditionally make an effigy of Guy and asked for donations "A penny for the Guy" which are spent on fireworks. On November 5 every year, communities build huge bonfires, burn the effigies, drink hot soup, and oo and ah to a fireworks display. 

I have always been a bit bemused by the fact that a failed terrorist attack is celebrated with childish glee in Jolly Olde England, but I am even more surprised to see how the populace of New Zealand seems to have taken to the event which happened on the other side of the world and eons before any Brit set his lily white foot on these shores. 

But celebrate, or at least commemorate they do, and we ate our last shipboard dinner while looking out the dining room windows and seeing fireworks sparkle above Devonports pretty shores.