New Zealand’s largest city has something for everyone, even hard-to-please teens.
One thing you have to say about New Zealand is that it is a varied land, and I’m not just talking about the landscape. On our most recent foray outside the thriving metropolis of Greymouth, we encountered ancient greeks, an even older reptile, a rampaging movie monster, and a precipitous fall.
Weta Workshop, Auckland, New Zealand. Photo by Chuck Black Photography
Spring is blooming here in New Zealand as we enter October. It’s not that we ever really saw winter on the West Coast. Despite being at the equivalent latitude as Minnesota, the ocean moderates the climate, and the vegetation remains green year-round, much to the irritation of my children, who discovered they have to mow the yard all winter.
As we start a new season, we see more flowers. The days get longer, the sun drips down into the ocean further south, and people complain about springing forward with daylight savings time.
We decided to leave the South Island and make a “return trip” to Auckland. We spent our first two weeks in New Zealand’s largest city, but all we saw was one view of the city from our hotel room as we waited out COVID quarantine. We were anxious to explore the city and see what it offered.
Auckland, New Zealand, seen from Skytower. Photo by Chuck Black Photography.
One significant driver of this visit was Delaney’s interest in seeing the display of ancient Greece artifacts at the national museum. Are you impressed that New Zealand has a collection of ancient Greek artifacts? Well, don’t be. These pieces were all on temporary loan from the British Museum in London.
Nonetheless, the New Zealand museum has extensive displays on the Māori people, New Zealand wildlife, and the rest of the world. We were all impressed by “Pete,” the 80 million-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex who stood in the lobby watching people eat their lunch in the cafeteria. Of course, Pete is an immigrant like us. New Zealand did have dinosaurs back in the day, but no T. Rex or thunder lizards of that size. However, it had a seven-foot-tall flightless bird known as the Auk. Fortunately for the Māori who arrived here in the 1300s, this real-life Big Bird was vegetation. Unfortunately for the Auk, the Māori were not vegetation; within 100 years, they had hunted the Auk to extinction. So goes the Wooly Mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, Dodo, Passenger Pidgeon …
“Pete” standing vigil over the cafeteria in the Auckland Museum. Photo by Chuck Black Photography.
The Greek exhibit focused on fleshing out the lives of the people who lived at that time through the surviving artifacts. Many of these items were prizes from sporting contests that were a big part of ancient Greek life. The Olympics are the most famous example, but it turns out the greeks celebrated all kinds of life events, including funerals, with contests of running, wrestling, and throwing various objects. Without TV, books, or much else for entertainment, live physical games were a central part of ancient Greek life.
Of course, there were also a lot of classical greek statues. Yet again, these had a major focus on the sports of the day as they are believed to be the likenesses of athletic heroes posing either amid competition or in the repose of victory.
The games were a form of nonlethal competition, but the Greeks also engaged in martial conflicts as the rivalries between various city-states boiled over. We saw the remains of ancient bronze weapons in the forms of spears and arrow points, and swords. But the one piece that surprised us the most was a suit of greek armor. The armor looks about the right size to fit my 5’4″ wife and way to small for my over six foot tall sons. After seeing the sculptures of the athletes in the previous room, we had come to think of the ancient greeks as larger than life, but the reality is they were quite small. At 6’2″, I would have been a giant back in the day, and today’s professional athletes would have looked like gods. It made me wonder how tall Goliath was and how he would have felt standing next to the starting lineup for the Chicago Bulls.
The “Winged Victory” statue of Nike is the goddess of Victory. The head would have been carved of marble and set atop the statue, but apparently, in all the victorying, Nike lost her head. Photo by Chuck Black Photography.
For more light-hearted fun, we slipped past trolls to visit the Wētā Workshop. New Zealand is well known as the filming location for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, and Wētā is the studio that worked on the special effects. An enthusiastic young woman led us on a ninety-minute exploration of sets and props from three non-LOTR movies the studio worked on. It was a blend of horror, fantasy, and science-fiction that combined movie sets, props, the making of those items, and multimedia presentations to show how they ended up in the final films. It was a fun, hands-on experience with the constantly running gag about a creature lose in the building. I highly recommend this, especially for older children and young-at-heart adults. We will make a point of visiting the main studio in Wellington to see all the LOTR swag.
The author posing with his new best friend, who just invited the author for dinner. Photo by Chuck Black Photography.
No trip would be complete without my daring daughter jumping off something. On this trip, it was the iconic Sky Tower in central Auckland. When we were here for quarantine, our hotel looked out on the concrete spire rising above the city like the Space Needle in Seattle. Our view changed little for that two weeks except for the nightly colors illuminating the tower, so it became a big part of our enforced isolation. Finally, we had the opportunity to do more than look at it from afar, and Delaney knew what she wanted to do, jump off it.
She fearlessly dressed in a jumpsuit that made her look like the newest cast member in Orange is the New Black. Then a professional strapped her into a harness, and they ascended to the tower’s upper level while the rest of us waited below. We watched her getting ready to jump courtesy of a monitor that allowed us to watch what was happening more than two football fields above our heads. Delaney handled it like a champ, walking out to the edge and jumping into nothing. A cable attached to her back arrested her fall, and she touched down like a superhero doing that superhero landing pose. She loved the sensation of sailing through the air; I was thrilled to have her back on the ground safely.
Skytower as seen from the ground just before Delaney jumped from the tiny platform, you can just see at the top of the image. Photo by Chuck Black Photography.
We also visited the specialty shops in the Bitmart area, but true to our Durango nature; we spent money in the shops that sold outdoor gear and books. We also enjoyed a few good meals in the big city. The kids loved getting pizza in Hell. The pizza was excellent, but I think the teens liked the joint as much for the name as the food.
If you want to dine in Hell, mingle with trolls, game with ancient greeks, take a rest at the feet of a T. Rex and fall twice the distance of the longest kickoff return in history, then Auckland has it all. Despite how much we had looked at Sky Tower longingly from a distance while in quarantine, up close, we found it to be a dull and utilitarian concrete structure. That was how we felt about the city of Auckland; it has all the elements of a major city but lacks the character and charm of other cities we have visited. The city seemed utilitarian with all the museums, parks, shopping malls, restaurants, and even Sky Tower, but it felt like a child-assembled hodge-podge.
Downtown Auckland seen from ground level. Photo by Chuck Black Photography.
I can’t say that any of us feel a burning desire to return to Auckland unless it is to visit some of the surrounding communities and islands about which we have heard good things. That wasn’t true of the town of Rotorua, our next stop.
