Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Good morning. One loves learning something new everyday. Today it is the word Aotearoa. “Aotearoa,” loosely translates from Maori as the “land of the long white cloud.” Apparently for half a decade or more some of the ingenious people of New Zealand have been promoting officially changing the name of the country to Aotearoa.
Today’s excursion is set to begin at 12:55; Auckland City Sights. The Mariner docked at Queens Wharf early this morning at 7 AM. Queens Wharf os quite literally in downtown Auckland. In fact it is at the end of Queen street.
A morning exploration of the town seemed a good idea. Maybe even have breakfast ashore, just for something different. As we were exiting the pier we stopped one of the young security officers and asked where we could find a nice restaurant for breakfast. She said to walk up Queen Street, the main drag, and look down the little side streets off to the north towards High Street. There would be a number of places to have a good breakfast. This is exactly what we did, sort of.
Exiting the wharf you first cross a fairly major roadway, the aptly named Quay Street. However, instead of heading straight up Queens Street, we jogged a little to the left and walked up High Street. We had gone only about 700 meters when we came to small pedestrian alley called Vulcan Lane. There were a couple restaurants there with outside seating.
The restaurants seemed to be a bit packed which is usually a good sign of a place with good eats. This especially true when they are a bit off the main drag and where tourists are less likely to wander. It turns out there were three restaurants or coffee shops serving coffee and breakfast.
We looked over a couple of them and decided on Le Chef which billed itself as a French Casual Bistro. Before you come down to hard on me for choosing a French restaurant in New Zealand, understand they said they served sourdough bread. Love that sourdough.
The Petit de Jeuner menu offered a number of things which were different and interesting, beside the sourdough bread. The first was eggs Benedict. Ah, we can get eggs Benedict in La Veranda, where they are quite good. Here they were offered a gluten fee eggs Benedict. The traditional poached eggs, served on “hash beignet”, with bacon and fresh homemade hollandaise sauce.
Beignet, based on our experiences at Café de Mode in New Orleans, is a type of fritter, or deep-fried pastry, or grossly donut, made from pâte à choux, but may also be made from other types of dough, including yeast dough. In France there are at least 20 different versions. They can vary in shape, the flour used for the dough, and the filling. Intrigued I inquired what a “hash beignet” was. The waitress looked at me quizzedly, like how do you not know what a has beignet is. She thought about it for a second, probably recognizing my American way of talking, and said, think of it as hash browns. Curiosity peaked it was just something one had to have. Mary was fascinated by the possibility of having some sourdough bread, so she ordered the sourdough bread and eggs, and added a side of bacon.
Before we get into the actual breakfast we need to talk about bacon. Many are aware there are different styles of bacon. Most American’s are probably ware of Canadian bacon. In the US Canadian bacon is the traditional piece of meat used in eggs Benedict. American bacon is cut from the belly of the pig and is usually very fatty and looks like streaks of fact and meat. It is also usually highly processed and sold in stores uncooked. Canadian bacon is back bacon, it is usually thinly sliced and precooked in the store.
The New Zealanders eat something they call middle bacon. Middle bacon and back bacon are a cut of bacon that includes the pork loin from the back of the pig. The New Zealanders version also includes a portion of the pork belly in the same cut. It is much leaner than American style side bacon which is made only from the pork belly. If you like your pork chop, then the New Zealander bacon and back bacon are derived from the same cut used for pork chops.
Let’s start with the eggs Benedict. The base was a square of “hash browns”. The term “hash browns” really doesn’t do them, justice. These are not the preformed, precooked and dropped in the deep fryer hash browns McDonald’s, Burger King, or Denny’s serve. These are soft, light and fluffy. Grilled enough that the potatoes are cooked but not dried out. Crispy on the outside without being crunchy. Their appearance would have you believe they were of a good hearty multigrain stock. Probably had an egg added to them before cooking.
A top this luscious bit of properly cooked potato pancake was a generous quantity of the New Zealander back on. It had just enough fat to make it favorable. It was cooked enough that the edges were just a little browned. It was thick enough that there was some heft to it without being chewy or tough. These two perfectly done bases were topped not with one or two egged poached just right, you know the exterior gentle wrapped around the warm soft liquid yolk.
All of this was topped with the nice yellow liquid of fresh homemade hollandaise sauce. There was no knife needed to cut it into the flavor bits you had the privilege of putting into your mouth. The hash browns were amazingly full of flavor. It is possible they used a combination on potato and the rustic sourdough bread to reach the right flavor fulled texture. This was the best poached eggs with hollandaise sauce ever.
Mary’s was no less a dish of perfection. There was the base of a nice think slice of a rustic sourdough bread which has been tasted to perfection. This was topped with two eggs over easy. Eggs over easy isn’t always the easiest way to prepare eggs. These however were prepared properly; the white was throughly cooked, the edges of the white weren’t browned and chewy as so often happens. The yolks were in tack, they were warmed as they should be, yet cooked. When you cut into them the dark yellow goodness in the yolk ran over the white and was absorbed in the bread below.
This was accompanied by several slices of the New Zealander bacon, which was also cooked to perfection. Mary has never been a large fan of bacon. However, she did comment this was the best bacon she had ever had. She further felt the whole dish was extremely loaded with flavor. It should be noted that Mary had a cappuccino which was not only prepared to perfection but had the most beautiful design.
The waitress who prepared they cappuccino didn’t really look Italian, but maybe she had a good percentage of Italian blood. The cook we didn’t see, but certainly he or she also was either Italian or had Italian blood. It maybe a thirteen plus hour direct flight from San Francisco, or a twenty-tree plus hour from Milano to Auckland, but it would be worth it to have breakfast here again. It probably would be wroth it return an try the little dishes on the Petite Faim menu or the larger dishes on the Les Specialites menu. I suspect that the Crème brûlée or Mousse au Chocolat are probably devine. Yes, I’ll post photos on facebook.
After that wonderful breakfast we decided to walk around the downtown a little more. One of the obvious attractions was the “Space needle”, for those from Seattle, attraction at the top of the hill just a couple blocks from down town. This iconic Auckland landmark, called the Sky Tower, is a telecommunications and observation tower. It is 1,076 feet (328 meters) tall structure completed in 1997. From 1996 until 2022 it was the tallest freestanding structure in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the 28th tallest tower in the world.
In contrast the Space Needle in Seattle is 605 feet tall. Now showing my age again, my father and mother took my sister Cathy and I to the 1962 World Fair which was held in Seattle and for which the Space Needle was constructed. It was quite a feat in 1962 to construct such a building. There was also no need for a telecommunications tower 1962 like there would have been in 1996.
Keeping the Sky Tower within in view we walked up the hill to its base. It wasn’t particularity easy to find where the entrance was. We stood for a while in the line for one of the attractions on the tower by mistake. The line we stood in was the “Skyjump” feature. The "SkyJump" is a guide-cable-controlled 630 foot (192-meter) jump from the observation deck. A jumper can reach up to 53 miles per hour (85 km/h). The guide-cable prevents jumpers from colliding with the tower in case of wind gusts.
We were interested in going to the main observation level at the 610 foot mark in the tower. The only disconcerting thing about standing in the wrong line was that there was a couple, probably a fe years older than us, who were buying tickets. It turns out the man actually bought tickets for something called the sky walk.
The Sky Walk allows you the opportunity to walk around on the outside, key point, ring 629 feet above the ground. You get to wear a complete harness set and are tethered to the building, but you ware walking around on metal pole wrapped around the building over 600 feet off the ground. They way it is not for the faint of heart as there are no handrails.
We took the escalator down to the underground base of the tower, where the ticket office for the observation level was located and purchased tickets. We had an opportunity tot all with the brave soul's wife. She through him completely crazy for doing the Sky Walk. So did we.
Standard observation deck is 610 feet off the ground (186 meters). It has 1.5 inch (38 mm) thick glass sections of flooring which give you a somewhat frightening view straight down to the ground. Just above the standard observation desk is the top observation deck labelled "Skydeck" which sits just below the main antenna at 720 feet (220 meters). Both decks give you 360-degree views of Auckland. It is claimed you can, on a clear day, get views of up to 51 miles (82 km) in the distance.
While I don’t know how far the view is today, I can say that was amazing. Auckland is a big sprawling city. Looking down through, even though the glass, it looked like a long way down. The elevator even had sections of the floor which were made of glass so you could see how far was left before you reached the ground in the controlled fall of the elevator. That was sufficient thrill for the day.
After the Sky Tower we walked back down to Queens Street and headed back to the ship. We stopped at a bank picked up some New Zealand currency just in case we saw something we needed. We went looking for a pharmacy in the hopes we could by some Dramamine, a weaker version of the seasick medication we can get at the reception desk, or maybe some patches for the seasickness. We didn’t have any luck. They did have the same medication as they give away for free on ship, so there was no incentive to buy any.
We stopped in a T2Tea an artisan tea shop on Queens street. This ship seems to be running low on English Breakfast tea so stocking up is a good idea. The Kenyan Gold tea packed and brought with us is almost out. It has been possible to bogart a few bags from the coffee connection self-help bar and the pool deck self-help bar, but they don’t always have English Breakfast. Now you can substitute Irish Breakfast for English Breakfast, but you can not under any circumstances substitute Earl Grey. For whatever be the reason non tea drinkers think Earl Grey and English Breakfast are the same and interchangeable; they are not!
The people at T2Tea seemed a little put off by someone wanting to purchase English Breakfast tea while they have some many better teas. It wasn’t much of a discussion, it is either yes you have it or no you don’t. They did and we could a small container of English Breakfast at a rather inflated price. Mary, being smarter than I, asked if there way a supermarket near by. The response was, yes just up the street.
We had passed the New World Metro when walking towards T2Tea, but the word metro implies metro or underground railway system. It had been dismissed as such. Turns out it is a supermarket chain. Taking the escalator down into the market we found a good-sized market. Here we found Twining English Breakfast and a Kenya Bold tea.
The purchases were unloaded in the suite and rested for a bit before heading to the bus for the 12:55 Auckland City Highlights tour. This three and a half hour tour is supposed to introduce us “to Auckland’s distinctive blend of modern cosmopolitan influences and Polynesian traditions. A city wrapped around two sizable harbors and numerous ancient volcanoes, Auckland is home to nearly a third of all New Zealanders, and the environment they share here seems livable, indeed. A drive through 200-acre Auckland Domain provides a slice of the city’s idyllic greenery, while a visit to the imposingly white-columned Auckland Museum atop the park’s highest hill provides the history.”
The Auckland Museum is actually the Auckland War Memorial Museum. It has been repurposed to more of a general museum. The stop there was an hour, which was probably a quarter of the amount of time you would need to really see this museum. There is a number of impressive full-scale artifacts from the region’s rich Maori and Polynesian heritage. Afterwards we took a quick spin along beautiful Tamaki Drive as it winds through historic Parnell Village and hugs the sandy beaches of Okahu Bay and Mission Bay. There were a number of mega-yachts and the former America’s Cup Yachting Village in the Viaduct Harbor district. There were panoramic views of a sea of masts at Westhaven Yacht Marina – the Southern Hemisphere’s largest.
We crossed over and under the 3,350-foot-long Auckland Harbor Bridge over Waitemata Harbor. We even got to see where the bungy-jumpers took off from the bridge. There is a lot of things we didn’t get to see in Auckland, and it probably would be worth a trip back, even if just for Le Chef.
Buonanotte e Ciao, Enrico
Comments