Auckland city tour (May 12/09 - Auckland, New Zealand)

This morning we lazed around the boat in the sunshine over breakfast, tending to a few boat jobs like some soldering and donating a bunch of our travel stuff to the Slapdash inventory. Eventually we got organized and headed downtown on foot, bound first for a legendary lunch spot called Food Alley, where cheap meals from a variety of Asian joints are all clustered in one spot (but classier than your average food court). Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese... the options were crazy! It was fun to see some semi-authentic versions of our favourite dishes from some of those places we went, and the ones we did try were damn fine. Stuffed, we left Seth to run around doing boat chores while Jaime took Ken and I on a walking tour of Auckland. It's an odd city with mostly modern buildings and some older brick structures, not-so-scenic harbour front, random parks all over the place, and occasional little alleyways packed with pricey boutiques. We took a bus up to the top of Queens Road, where a greenbelt dotted with palm trees and statues parallels the noisy main drag just a block away. We passed a couple museums and busy shopping streets, cutting through a couple landscaped parks and a small university campus before winding down the twisty boutique streets to the waterfront, where the marina is. Jaime and I took a little detour into a mall for girly manicures, and then we headed for the grocery store to restock the fridge and pick up a few more bottles of local wine that work out to only about $6 a bottle! Back on the boat, we were introduced to Jaime and Seth's friend Micah, who quit his job and is joining their crew for a few months. Seth whipped up a fabulous quiche for dinner, and after some more chatting, we unanimously voted to call it a day.