Another early trip to the airport and back to Auckland for the final leg of the journey. The flight times and costs actually meant it was better to get return trips Melbourne-Auckland and Auckland-Wellington. The timing worked out perfectly and we were back at the same hotel in downtown by about 12:00pm. Generally I found that the hotels were quite expensive and came with limited options in both cities, and the overall number of hotels were quite limited too.
We were quite lucky that they had a room ready to go, so we quickly dropped off everything and then ran downtown in order to have time for lunch before the train departed. This time I tried Burger Mechanics which was quite good, but not in the same league as Burger Fuel, 8 out of 10. No time for an energy drink today...
The destination station was Kingsland which is right across from
Eden Park, where they play various forms of rugby, and even some cricket too. They only have a 2:00pm tour each day, which we just made it in time for. The guide seemed like he doesn't do the job regularly, I think I overhead him say they rotate the person who gets assigned the tour duty. He still did a pretty good job however, he just didn't have the flow and presentation that a regular guide might have. When we got down to the field level he didn't really care what people did, so a bunch of people walked right out onto the grass past the boundary line, leading to an angry security guard and groundsmen rushing over and telling them off - and the tour guide still didn't care what was going on. These people are always so precious about their grass. The rest of the tour included the change rooms, corporate level, media room and the top deck.
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| Eden Park. |
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| Me at Eden Park. |
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| Also Eden Park. |
Back to Auckland again and I decided to see what was up at
Karangahape Road, often just called K Road because it's a whole lot easier. It was a surprisingly long road full of restaurants and some other stuff, perhaps similar to something like Bridge Road. The shops were also concentrated into themes, so at first there was nothing but Chinese restaurants, then a group of kebab restaurants, then the adult entertainment district...
Back at the east end of K Road I kept walking through to Grafton Village until reaching
Auckland Domain. This place was just massive, huge areas of open space, parks and sports fields - really impressive. Since it was starting to get late I kept the exploring to a minimum, going past the Watergardens fernery that I think was about to close for the day and then the big museum situated at the top of the hill.
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| Big empty space at Auckland Domain. |
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| I'm pretty sure this is Auckland Museum. |
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