By Ruth
Distance: 16 km
Today we walked through Auckland on the Coast to Coast Walkway, which goes from the East coast to the West coast of the north island of New Zealand. Luckily in Auckland the island becomes very narrow so this isn’t such a huge distance.
In the morning we left our Airbnb in Ponsonby and went to the budget hotel downtown where we are staying tonight. We left our big packs there and set out on the trail. Although it’s a bit strange to call it a trail when today’s walk was entirely on city streets and through urban parks.
It was a beautiful day. We walked through the University of Auckland, the Auckland Reserve, Mount Eden, stopped for a great lunch and coffee in the Epsom neighborhood, kept going through Cornwall Park, and into Onehunga.
Cornwall Park was one of the highlights of Auckland for us. This big city park has olive trees and a sheep herd! It was so cute to see the sheep munching grass and relaxing in the shade of some beautiful big olive trees. These particular olive trees don’t produce much fruit apparently, but we recently learned that further south there are olive orchards and you can get New Zealand grown olive oil! Something we are very excited to try when we are in that area.
This section of trail was a bit funny because it was obviously trying to take us through as many parks as possible, even if sometimes it didn’t make any sense. For example, this 200 metre detour into a park, past a playground and WWI memorial arch, when we could easily have just continued straight on the road.
As we went further south we got to a more industrial area and eventually reached the west coast. Since we have being doing a few tide crossings lately, we are a bit more aware of the tides. Upon arriving at the water around 2:30pm, we could see the tide was very far out. At first I thought that can’t be right, because I knew high tide yesterday was at 3:15. The tide should have been very high. I was confused for a while before it clicked: we had crossed to the other coast, so the tides were opposite to what we are used to! My mind was blown.
Afterwards we took the train back downtown and went to a tapas bar for a nice dinner. Tomorrow morning we are taking an early bus down to the Bombay Hills to rejoin the trail in earnest. Our stay in Auckland has been great to relax and recover from our minor foot and leg ailments, but it definitely feels like time to start walking again.