My friends in Auckland lived in an area called Herne Bay. They inhabited a modest villa on a sloping street of pretty white gingerbread, a closely knit forum of fences and porches. At the top of the hill, you looked back and saw the corrugated metal roofs laid out in a jumble of bright reds and greens that conjured up images of a strangely prim and prosperous Caribbean island.
Here, at the summit, ran the business center, an awninged main street clustering a butcher, vintage grocery stores, bookstores (new and second-hand), airy cafes, a pub. Everything the civilized person needs for a contented life.
Down the hill, on the other side, a small cove opened up toward the greater harbor. A wooden pier jutted out into the water, and wavelets crumpled along the beach.
“In the summer,” Gilbert said, “Jo and Matti and I will often come here for a swim after work.”
We walked back in the direction of Jervois Road, passing a house owned by the Sultan of Brunei, invisible behind a gate and thick green foliage.
“He came here for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting,” Gilbert said, “and decided he didn’t like it. So he got a room downtown at the Regent Hotel.”
Then we came to fenced grounds where men were playing boules.
“Here’s a perfect example of how the city is changing,” Gilbert said. “This used to be a lawn bowling club.”
Everything stood out with stunning clarity, as when the optometrist suddenly finds the right combination of lenses.
“The light’s different down here in the Southern Hemisphere,” Gilbert explained.
But it hadn’t looked this sharp in Peru, or Uruguay. People talk about the special quality of light in Provence, and New Mexico; I’ve been to those places, too, and it couldn’t compare to this.
Maybe there was something in the cleansing nature of the wind, which hadn’t abated since my arrival and made me understand the local passion for sailing.
Gilbert was an editor at the New Zealand Herald whom I met a few years ago when he came to Ft. Lauderdale on a Fulbright exchange for what he still calls “four of the strangest months of my life.”
Our tour the next morning regularly skirted water. (Another contributor, no doubt, to the crystalline light.) It lapped against the bottom of Albert Street; it was what the statue of the Maori figure in the kaitaka cloak surveyed from his spot on Queen Elizabeth II Square.
Monday through Friday workers commuted across it, or stared down into it while stuck in gridlock on the Harbour Bridge. The waterborne disembarked at the Ferry Building, which squatted in neo-classical solitude against a backdrop of modern glass cubes.
Still, the city had a clutterless sweep that reminded me not of Sydney (the harbor of which developers have filled to the brim) but Oslo, the capital of another nature-loving people.
We drove out along Tamaki Drive to Bastion Point, where Michael Joseph Savage lies buried in the vault of a fort. As prime minister in the late 1930s, Savage built affordable housing, instituted free health care, increased pensions, creating what has been called the world’s first model welfare state. For his funeral, thousands of people lined the streets to pay their last respects.
“It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening today,” said Gilbert. Atop the park’s low, windswept hill, a bust of the great Labour leader stared out across the water toward Rangitoto Island.
That afternoon, we pushed his daughter Matti in her stroller to a local park that was hosting a festival. Families strolled from booth to booth, admiring crafts and sampling foodstuffs. (We stopped for a pile of mussels that had been tossed in a pan over a high flame and doused with garlic and hot pepper sauce; they redefined for me the meaning of mussel.)
A striking number of the adults were well-built (tattoos adorning some of the biceps and calves) with brilliant black hair and fine chiseled features — Maoris or their descendants.
Gilbert said that there has long been intermarriage between the native people and the European settlers, and I remembered reading that Auckland claims to be the world’s largest Polynesian city. (Here already two global distinctions for a country that often fails to register in the rest of the world’s imagination.) This one comes not just from the Maori population, but from the growing number of immigrants from Samoa, Tonga and other South Pacific islands.
Driving through the city the next day I saw a man in a grass skirt getting into a car (a pretty neat trick, I thought), and Gilbert informed me that he was a Tongan, probably going visiting after church.
Later, traveling around the country, I found that a popular pastime was heaping abuse on Auckland, and I sensed that one of the irritants was the city’s racial make-up. (In somewhat the same way that Americans complain about never getting an English-speaking taxi driver in New York.)
The most important factor, surely, was the fact that with nearly a million inhabitants, this was the largest metropolis (albeit, by our standards, an extremely safe and livable one) in a country known for its natural beauty, and that sitting captive in the ever-worsening traffic snarls were born sailors and die-hard hikers, i.e. people in need of open spaces.
But there was also, especially in the countryside, especially among the older generation, a feeling that Auckland was a blight, a place to be avoided, in part, it seemed, because it was not as Anglo as the rest of the country. And the onus clung to every resident. Gilbert told me that around the country Aucklanders are called JAFA’s, which is the name of a candy on a stick but in this case serves as the acronym for “Just Another (we’ll be polite here) Freaking Aucklander.”
The municipal tourist board, unflinchingly, picked up this epithet and for promotional purposes changed it to “Just Amazing Fun-filled Auckland.” I can still hear Gilbert’s laughter as he uttered this slogan.
As much as he liked living in Auckland, Gilbert saw its deficiencies. It lacked an edge. Wellington, the capital, had more of a buzz — an arts scene, a cafe society, finer restaurants, political intrigues.
Auckland was the financial center. And it was too spread out; it had lovely areas, like Herne Bay and Ponsonby, but it lacked a vibrant focal point. You could go months without seeing someone, while in Wellington you were always running into people you knew. Downtown, many of the lovely old buildings had been razed for uninspiring modern boxes, and a Planet Hollywood had just gone up. “Everywhere else in the world they’re closing,” moaned Gilbert. “Here, we’re opening one.”
Yet not far away was the Shakespeare Pub, where you could drink a dark ale by the name of Falstaff. For lunch you could order Japanese take-out or eat a Ponsonby pie, “the best in the world,” according to Gilbert. “They wanted to start exporting to Australia, but the Australians refused them, saying they contained too much meat.”
One day he took me to a noodle house not far from his office, a subterranean place identified, oddly, by a fried chicken sign, where we received two great bowls for under $10. “Classic immigrant success story,” said Gilbert. “A Chinese family came from Malaysia and started a small place that did so well that they opened this one.”
There was good public transportation. There were excellent independent bookstores. (A Borders had recently opened, which no one I met seemed to like very much.) There were afternoon shoppers animating Queen Street, where there were more woolen goods for sale than you could wear in a lifetime. There were the bohemian efforts of High Street. There was the stately Auckland Museum, up in the Domain, with its unobstructed view of the harbor decreed by law. There was Edmund Hillary’s number in the phone book. There was a leveling ease and equanimity about the people, who seemed joined in a kind of conspiracy of good fortune at having all landed here from much worse places far away. And, almost everywhere you looked, there was water.
The America’s Cup village sat at the western edge of the downtown port. At the entrance stood the KZI New Zealand, “one of the biggest sloop-rigged yachts ever built,” according to the plaque underneath it, which told the story of its “ludicrous mismatch” with Dennis Conner’s 60-ft catamaran, which resulted in KZI “meritably losing 3-0.” It went on: “New Zealand has challenged the America’s Cup on three other occasions. In 1995, Black Magic soundly beat Dennis Conner in America’s Stars & Stripes and brought the America’s Cup to New Zealand.” In Christchurch, a woman had told me: “We New Zealanders love to hate Dennis Conner.”
The round robins were currently going on, with the defender New Zealand sitting back and waiting. The country had just suffered grave national disappointment twice in rugby, first watching its beloved All Blacks lose to France in the semifinals of the World Cup, and then seeing cross-Tasman Sea rival Australia beat the French — and bag one more in a growing collection of international titles.
“Why do New Zealanders drink out of saucers?” went a popular joke in Sydney. “Because Australia has all the cups.” Sailing offered a chance for redemption.
The various boathouses, hangars larger than you’d think would be necessary, jostled for space along the dock, and appended to each was a portable gift shop.
The Team Dennis Conner store opened into a gallery housing the “Dennis Conner Collection,” which consisted of elegant ship models (“1876 America’s Cup defender Madeleine, New York City Yacht Club”) and the skipper’s own paintings.
Even here, on the promotional end, there was a tight-lipped air of secrecy and suspicion, directed especially at people wielding notebooks. From travel writer to racing spy: I wasn’t sure this constituted a promotion.
The folks with America True, of the San Francisco Yacht Club, were by far the most accommodating.
“We’re the only mixed-crew boat,” said Sandra Welsh proudly. “I was a racer. But I couldn’t race against the men. It wasn’t allowed; you just accepted it back then.” She was volunteering while her husband was home, coaching the University of Virginia football team.
Behind the counter sat Mary Kingston, of Cork, Ireland, whose boyfriend, Kelvin, was the boat’s tactician. He was also a New Zealander. I asked how he would feel racing against his own country.
“There are so many good sailors in New Zealand,” Kingston said, “that it’s normal for them to work on other crews. Our helmsman’s a Kiwi, and our bowman.”
“It’s a full-time profession,” said Welsh. “Kelvin will go from here to another race.
“The thing about racing,” she added, “is that it’s not just a sport. What we do out there” — she looked off in the direction of Hauraki Gulf — “contributes to advances in technology, navigation. It has a wider application. Unlike football.”
The sun came out as I left the village, so I hopped on the ferry to Devonport. After a pleasant, 10-minute journey north, I entered a bedroom community with the look and feel of a seaside resort. In a park with a beach, mothers pushed their children on swings; nearby the branches of an ancient rubber tree meandered in intricate airborne patterns. Everyone looked healthy, upstanding, benevolent. Paint was fresh and dogs were well-groomed. The main street was a sloping curve of handsome, awninged, two-story facades, in the middle of which stood a “muzeum,” (so proclaimed the letters across it) topped at each corner with a red London phone booth.
“Mr. Jackson would be delighted to see you taking a picture of his muzeum,” a tiny, white-haired woman said. “He had such a wonderful collection of the most amazing things, and the city made him close it down. Such a pity.” Then she headed off, telling me to enjoy my day.
I crossed the street and stepped into a bookstore. The owner was reading on a stool behind the counter. She had moved from Wellington, a kind of life-change, I gathered, and was enjoying it so far. “The weather’s much better here,” she said. We chatted effortlessly; I looked at my watch. I had to get back to Herne Bay, pack, go to the airport.
“Here, take one of my bookmarks,” the woman said, picking from a pile. Under the words “Paradox Books,” the last dangled on a line tied to a sliver of moon, a bespectacled woman sat rowing a boat across the open pages of a book, the lines of type rising like small waves. “It will remind you,” she said, “of your run to catch the ferry.”
And other things as well.
Postscript: In early March, Team New Zealand swept Italy’s Prada Challenge 5-0 in its first defense of the America’s Cup.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
United and American are among airlines flying from Chicago to Auckland. Fares for a hypothetical departure in early May (fall in the Southern Hemisphere) would run about $1,000 to $1,100 round trip, with one stop en route.
GETTING AROUND
Auckland is a spread-out city, so it probably pays to rent a car. And after a day or two you’ll want to head out into the countryside anyway. But if you need it, public transportation is excellent, and nothing lifts the spirits like getting on a ferry.
DINING
Auckland is awash in ethnic restaurants, with most Asian cuisines represented. The sushi is wonderfully fresh and relatively inexpensive (Rikka in Newmarket has a lot of hard surfaces and is popular with Japanese). For local fare, there’s lamb, probably the world’s best mussels and pies. (I’m a traditionalist — steak and potato — but you can go for silverbeet and cheese.)
LODGING
Downtown, there’s the usual grouping of business and tourist hotels. For a more atmospheric stay in a neighborhood villa, try The Great Ponsonby Bed & Breakfast, 30 Ponsonby Terrace, Ponsonby, Auckland, N.Z.; phone 011-64-9-376-5989; fax 011-64-9-376-5527; e-mail great.ponsonby@extra.co.nz; www.ponsonbybnb.co.nz/.
GUIDEBOOKS
The Rough Guide, once again, proved invaluable.
INFORMATION
Contact New Zealand Tourism at 800-388-5494; www.purenz.com.
