I booked a week in Auckland, because at the time I didn't know any better. It's not unpleasant, not even unloveable, it's just that I am deeply cheap and, now, genuinely poor, here at the end of my travels. Down to a mere NZ$50 a day after hostel fees - that's £20 English for food, entertainment, refreshment and back-of-sofa mislayings and forgetfullness - for every whole entire complete and unabridged revolution of the Planet. Not so easy when one is trying quite hard to see and do as much as possible before returning ignominiously to Blighty.
New Zealand's `greatest city` as it cheerfully calls itself, much to the chagrin of the capital Wellington, is not cheap but, in a strange twist of fortune, there isn't actually enough to do for whole week here anyway. Not enough for anyone unwilling to leave the city (and I mean leave by a good hundred miles, to the northernmost tip of the country at 90 Mile Beach or venture southeast to the centre of the North Island and Lake Taupo, or similar) so perhaps it is somewhat serendipitous that I am poor at the same time that the city has little to offer the casual tourist.
Of course that isn't true, but I don't fancy walking across the upper span of the Auckland Harbour Bridge (the standard, default activity touted to all backpackers upon entering the city limits, perhaps even by law) because I have seen many spectacular bridges and the Auckland Harbour one isn't, and anyway it costs a scandalous $150 and for that they can bloody well whistle, thank you so very much.
There are many other things to do but few unique to this city; I can see the latest films wherever I happen to be; I can eat in almost all of the same type and standard of restaurants in any major city in the world; I can be mugged and beaten by the criminal element of my choice wherever the wind blows me.

Now Wellington, the actual seat of power, politics and of course the real capital ever since about 1860 (though I bloody forgot it myself and mistakenly named Ol' Aucksville as capital on these very pages, ho ho such an idiot am I!) will, I hope and trust, prove different, more exuberant, much more vibrant and exciting, and to make certain that this is so I have booked myself a shorter stay there, because as we all know there is an equal and opposite force to Serendipity, commonly called shit-normal-fucking-evil-arsed-rotten-luck; a.k.a, as many will agree, Real Life.
In any case, back to the city, and the fact that Auckland derives its power, and at the end of the day the single reason it can lay claim to the title of greatest; pure size; from its geographic location, which is certainly fairly unusual. The city is the largest in Polynesia, as NZ does in fact lie within that region according to whoever makes these things up, and as is often said it contains quite a large number of ethnic populations, almost all from Pacific island nations, that are greater in size than those actually resident upon those isles, in which case one could argue that Tonga, Samoa, and many other independent countries are now de facto New Zealand territories, although not too loud in case of a sudden, localised plague of patriotic stabbing.

Auckland sits astride an isthmus and covers it entirely from coast to coast, and with a major harbour on both sides it is one of the few cities in the world to dominate local shipping on two major bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean to the northeast, and the Tasman Sea to the southwest.
As a city to live in it seems much like any other, like many others in fact; cosmopolitan to the point of madness, as often one finds oneself walking any street other than the main city drag (in Auckland's case one Queen Street) wondering where all the nice, normal European-descended pasty white folk have gone, as everyone on the road, in the cars, frequenting the shops and manning the cash registers within appears to be Japanese, Chinese or Korean, and there are six sushi joints you could happily pitch a stone into accurately. Not to mention the myriad other shops that you cannot even describe because the signs and everything in and around them are written in some kind of altaic, like kanji, or sintic form. And of course, again, this isn't even slightly true, it's simply that these things stick out to the pasty white gaijin mind, but on some streets it is amazing, really.

This mixture of life and cultures is one of the great things about Auckland though, and like London, New York and many others a rich community has built up for just about every nation who walks the Earth, and with a little encouragement and the occasioanl intervention of government they don;t always have to run about sticking sharp things into one another because of what their ancestor said about our ancestor at that big battle half a thousand years ago. In truth there is very little of all that that I have seen, and in about seven months living in New Zealand I have seen and heard of only a handful of racist, bigoted and otherwise fundamentally mornic discriminatory behaviour, much of it sponsored by alcohol, which is of course at the root of all evils within society (along with money, capitalism, communism, religion, greed, creed, colour, being a filthy foreigner, getting yourself born in the first place..)

Another big fact of life in this city, often mentioned in guidebooks and the like, is the Aucklander's love of the motorcar, a passion so deep and abiding it might seemingly even extend to a weird Toad Of Toad Hall-style of obsession that may or may not have historically seen residents scooting maniacally about the countryside painted green and running things over, but which certainly saw to it that urban planning for the better part of the last century pretty much excluded all the poor bastards not in possesion of their own fine motorcar, so that pavements in many areas of the city are a fairly recent addition, only cropping up in some places in the last thirty years or so. Also notable are the perhaps slightly even road markings in places giving rather too much right of way to traffic and rather less (i.e. none at all, at some junctions) to the footfalling ambulatory mortal.
That the Auckland Harbour Bridge, much as it does not impress me much (just call me Shania), which is undeniably one of the major symbols of the city and one of its key talking points, in such circles as might dwell on these things, does not actually provide in any way shape or form the means to traverse it by foot or by bicycle - that there is in fact no way to use the bloody thing without sacrificing fossil fuel deposits in some sort of motive engine - says a lot about historic attitudes in the city towards people, cars and the outright silliness of walking between places.
The bridge is now being extensively remodelled to include that portion of society that is a) concerned for Mother Earth and b) cheap.

Auckland boasts, and I'm sure it actually would, the second highest rate of vehicle ownership per-capita in the world - no shit, it really does. The first is almost certainly Mexico City, or New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul....actually I think it is Paris. Anyway Auckland has all but one of them beat; can you believe that? I couldn't. Then I accepted it and came up with the ludicrously over-claused and convoluted paragraph above. See, that's what happen in the face of shocking statistics. Utter madness. Anyway Auckland, in its madness and general kiwi oddness, now presents its rate of car ownbership as 578 vehicles per 1000 citizens, which is very high indeed, apparently. It's certainly noticeable at street level where drivers are more irate than elsewhere in the country (they only wait 3 seconds for you to cross the road in front of them before shooting ahead, unlike the 10 second standard elsewhere. Gotta love that laid back Kiwi attitude) and traffic lights are even more brief in their graces in granting passage across the tarmac.
All that said, it is still a much easier, more pleasant and far more idiot-friendly (handy I was here to test it, then) than just about any city in the UK, and certainly than any I saw in India, southeast Asia or anywhere else I've been, even Australia. Perhaps especially Australia. They can smell a pommie at three hundred paces, or so it's said.

That bridge, by the way, connects downtown Aucland with the North Shore, apparently a residential outpost and smaller-scale fishing port, although of course almost everything is small scale compared to the major activity that throngs the dual ports of Auckland proper, nevertheless the North Shore is famous around the world for its seafood, and it is only shame for you, dear reader, that I am far too much of a cheapskate to go and experience it myself.
When I come back here, I'm totally there :)