Auckland

---

Hello!
Now adding a New Zealand leg to my trip, starting in Auckland.
The city of Auckland is not built on 7 hills but on 48 volcanoes! So there's lots of going up and down. I don't think I've come across a single flat street...
It's quite spread out, but even then, that's a lot of volcanoes in a same place...
It's also the city with the biggest Pacific Islanders population, with people coming from Fiji, Samoa, Tonga etc...
With over a million of the four million New Zealanders, it is the big city in NZ.
Auckland too has its own nice bay, harbour and Harbour Bridge which goes with it.
Sweet.
Oli

---

Photos

Sky Tower
At 328m, it's the tallest standing structure in the Southern Hemisphere.

Looking down from Sky Tower
Of course you can jump from it, like from nearly everywhere in NZ; bungy jumping and sky diving are popular hobbies here.

Auckland Museum
I was only intending to spend a couple of hours there, but in the end I spent a whole day in it.
The ground floor is dedicated to Maori and other Pacific Islands cultures, the first floor is about natural history, presented in a very interactive way, and the second floor has NZ's war museum and memorial.

Maori woodcarving
Auckland Museum.

[i]Patara Te Tuhi: an old warrior[/i]
Painting by Charles Goldie who did a lot of Maori portraits, especially of elderly people with traditional facial tatoos or moko, at the beginning of the 20th century.

Enjoying some Maori culture
The Maori were the first inhabitants of NZ but only arrived between 900 and 1400 from Eastern Polynesia on their wakas (big canoes). Their ancestors populated most of the Pacific Islands progressively after starting migrating from a place around Taiwan four or five thousand years ago.

Early morning view on Rangitoto Island from Mt Eden
Both are volcanoes of course.
That's the start of my NZ tour. Off we go!