auckland: the city with many faces

we arrived in auckland on monday 10th february after driving up from rotorua via hobbiton and the glow worm caves. we had a quiet night on monday night after our busy day and set off on tuesday morning to explore auckland. our first point of call was ponsonby for lunch, a trendy suburb filled with cafes, bars, book shops, antique shops and other bits & bobs. although we had a good, cheap lunch, the ponsonby suburb itself was missing a little bit of atmosphere. we went off in search of more appealing areas, so took a short drive to piha, a black sand beach just over the waitakere ranges. the black sand at piha beach is due to the high iron content (as i understand it).

jam and i had a stop in the beautiful waitakere ranges regional park visitor's centre. we climbed up to the lookout and enjoyed the glorious view across the city, ranges and beach.

in the evening we went to see '12 years a slave' at capitol cinema, a beautiful art deco cinema in balmoral. on wednesday we decided to explore a little more of the city centre and set off on a guided walk which took us down 'k' road (karangahape road to use it's full name), through st kevin's arcade and myers park, passing the town hall and aotea square, the civic theatre where we had lunch nearby and had a quick cinema pit stop at the academy cinema (another art house cinema) to see 'kill your darlings'. here's a picture of the funky st kevin's arcade.

after our cinema pit stop we went to auckland art gallery where we had a very interesting guided tour of the gallery, hearing about all the different new zealand art contained in the gallery. the building itself is stunning, a mixture of old and new since a recent expansion, and i understand that the gallery won an award for it's architecture last year. i don't think i've really done it justice in this photograph. 

we continued to the walk around auckland city and made our way to the harbour via the very pretty albert park which was in the process of being set up for the lantern festival, which was taking place in a few days time.

we had dinner at coco's cantina, a really funky italian restaurant, on k road where we feasted on meatballs and happy hour drinks. 

our last day in auckland was rounded off with a trip up to mount eden at sunset where we enjoyed some great views across the city as the sun went down. at the top of the mountain there is a huge crater 50 metres deep, formed after the last volcanic eruption from this point thousands of years ago. you can see the edge of this perfectly circular crater in the bottom corner of the photo below.