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Published: January 31st 2010
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Auckland city
seen from the cone of Mount Eden - Auckland's highest point I am very lucky to have a kiwi friend in Holland who happens to be ‘home’ this week. Sharon has agreed to spend some time with me acting as my guide and provider of trivia in Auckland, so I can see the city from the perspective of an ex-pat local.
Overall, Auckland is one big mass of volcanoes. These are called dormant rather than extinct, as it could be disastrous to think that they’d never erupt again. Sharon’s sister Jackie joined us today (she has a car) so we toured some of the volcanic cones. By far and away the most impressive is Mount Eden. This is very close to the city centre, and also the highest point in greater Auckland. It’s quite sobering to stand on the edge of the grass clad crater edge and think of what might happen if this were to erupt.
Most of the hills in and around Auckland are volcanic. You can drive up Mount Albert, walk up Mount Wellington from the Sylvia suburban railway station, and search for the missing tree on One Tree Hill. There are also a few islands in the bay that were formed by eruptions. The best one
Rangitoto
Auckland's most recently created volcanic island as seen from the mainland in my opinion is Rangitoto which was formed just a few hundred years ago, and is still a barren bird sanctuary. What makes this special is that in the main Auckland museum, there is a simulation of the eruption of such an island. You sit in the living room watching TV, looking out of your patio window, and start to see steam rising from part of the sea. Then there seems to be a bit of a technical hitch with the TV broadcast before it goes blank, and you see an explosion in the sea, with smoke and rock shooting into the sky. In the distance, you then see a great wall of black cloud building up, and this then starts to rush towards you across the bay. It doesn’t stop, and as it gets closer, it seems to be moving shockingly faster, and you realise it won’t stop. As this enormous wall of black swirling destruction hits your house at hundreds of miles an hour, there is a jolt, and everything goes blank. Sobering.
The rest of Auckland’s memorial museum is full of NZ history, including some great Maori buildings. The Marae mock-up is full of wood sculptures
Ancestoral protection
was provided by these wooden carvings inside the Maori Marae (communal houses) that are there to protect the residents, and a number of other storage buildings are similarly decorated externally. They also have a large war canoe (a waka) with a capacity for 100 men.
Jackie is a property developer so was able to show me some great houses. She explained that with wooden construction, it is very easy to move home - i.e. change the location of your house. When developing sites, she regularly moves a house from one side of a site to the other in order to change the view, make room for more structures, or simply change the layout of the plot to meet a client’s wishes. Large lorries can be used to “move house” if a completely new location is desired, and in one case, Jackie showed me a wooden church that had been moved across the road. All very practical.
Can’t remember if I mentioned it before, but Auckland is surrounded by the sea, so many locals own a boat, and everyone has access to beaches and a varied coastline. This has to be one of the biggest plus points for the city which at 1.4 million is 3 times larger than either Wellington
Marae roof
Altough this looks like flax, it probably had a layer of corrigated iron above to keep the water out (the capital) or Christchurch, so has pretty much all the facilities and resources you’d want in a big city. I still can’t quite work out why anyone would want to leave and live abroad.
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