Auckland, New Zealand

We'd been to Auckland on both the 2015 and 2018 world cruises, so go to those pages to see what we did then. This time we found other adventures...

From our berth: we were across from the ferry dock and on the other side of that dock was a Viking ship.

The old brick ferry building contrasts with the modern city buildings.

Our first adventure was to take the bus to Mt. Eden. We were in the front seats of a double-decker bus where it was a great view of the city.

Mt. Eden is a nature reserve built on a dormant volcanic cinder cone located on the outskirts of the city. Actually, Aukland contains 53 volcanic cindercones.

 
We had a wonderful conversation with these young women. Their sister was getting married so one had traveled from the UK to be there. We took their picture and they took ours.

A look back to One-Tree Hill, another cinder cone.

 
A huge spreading pine tree and the top of the Sky Tower was in the clouds.

After walking around the top of Mt. Eden and seeing the views in all directions we headed back down and took the bus back to the ferry terminal and took a ferry to Devonport.

We had not been to Devonport before. It was quite charming.

We headed out to the end of the peninsula where there was a hill called North Head, also a cinder cone.

Wooden carving at the top of a library entrance.

Some of the many giant trees in park areas along the waterfront walk.

We loved this row of houses that face the shoreline walk with their beautiful non-lawn landscapes.

 
We liked the starfish logo of the local yacht club. Again, the hill is a reserve open for all.

Being a high point of land on the end of the penninsula, it had been fortified at various times to defend the entrance to the bay.

A look back to Auckland and to Victoria Mountain in the middle of Devonport, which was our next stop...yet another cinder cone.

Across the strait, this whole volcanic island is a nature reserve called Rangitoto.

We walked around to where the tour buses and other groups had stopped for the view and we were surprised to see this guy catching the updrafts on that side of the hill with his parasail. He was skilled parasailor.

After coming down the hill, we crossed a large cricket field where several boys were practicing. Three boys were pitching to the one guy in the batting cage. They all did an interesting hop/skip before doing a straight arm wind-up into the pitch. Dean took a video of all the boys as they pitched. They were quite interested to check out their forms.

After crossing the cricket field, we walked through a nice neighborhood to get to a walkway up Victoria Mountain.

This was the beginning of the walkway called Flagstaff Lane, but after climbing the stairs at the top of this alley...

A large poplar had recently fallen across the stairs.

 
While we took off our backpacks and crawled under the tree, people coming down went over the tree, of course, they were a bit younger and more agile than us.

A stone tiki of a thinking warrier with his hand under his chin.

There were many agapanthus lilies (Agapanthus africanus) in bloom in all of our New Zealand ports: most are blue, but some were white like this one. It's called the African lily or the lily-of-the-Nile in spite of its being native to only South Africa.

Looking back to North Head, you can also see the large swath of lawn, which is the cricket field called the Devonport Domain.

Looking across the town and then across to Auckland. The Devonport ferry port is on the left of this view.

A shot back to Auckland shows the Viking ship and the Zuiderdam. On the Devonport side is a naval base.

We enjoyed the stroll back through the town.

There were lots of rain lilies in full bloom, so that was nice. This was probably the result after so much rainy weather in the weeks before our arrival.

 
We stopped to take photos of the library cat statue and then an albatross sculpture out next to the ferry dock.
After climbing three hills, we called it a day, took the ferry back to town, and walked to the ship. Hot showers were taken to prepare for climbing another hill the next day in Tauranga.

A photo from the ship of a class sailboat race with Devonport and its two hills in the background. Heavy rain was on its way. Those racers got wet for sure.