Giveaways
ON Auckland Anniversary Day, Monday 27 January 2025, I decided to pop down to the Auckland Waterfront.
Auckland Anniversary Day is a day for boat races, of which the main Auckland Anniversary Regatta, raced since 1840 (though in September to begin with) and as such in its 185th year, is New Zealand’s oldest sporting event and, as it would seem, the oldest yacht race in the world as well, predating the America’s Cup (1851) by more than a decade.
Here’s the official website for the regatta: regatta.org.nz. Nowadays, there is a wide variety of races held on the day including races between Chinese-style dragon boats, which I watched.
Here’s a video I made of the dragon boat racing.
Auckland’s waterfront used to be quite industrial, and still looks that way in places.
But it is being opened up to the people more and more.
The map just above shows some of the waterfront’s attractions. These include, from west to east:
The working freight port is now to the east of the public waterfront.
Here are some photos that show the area’s increasing funkiness, mainly in the areas where some older buildings survive and have been made into cafes and restaurants.
Back down on the actual waterfront, it turns out that you can go on a whale and dolphin safari!
I also saw an organisation called Sea Cleaners, which collects the floating plastic trash and other rubbish from the sea.
(Aside from lost fishing nets and the like, how does all this rubbish get into the sea in the first place? That’s what I’d like to know. Some people must be really slack.)
The waterfront has a growing number of paths and lanes for cyclists and pedestrians, such as this one to the comparatively distant suburb of Mission Bay.
Here is a clickable thumbnail map for the user-generated website Auckland Bike Map, which seems to be more user-friendly than the official Auckland Transport maps of cycling and walking trails. The dark green lines in the thumbnail are what Auckland Bike Map, as of the time of writing (31 January 2025) calls Category A, “Safe, off-road paths.”
In terms of appearance, the cycling and walking paths around the waterfront vary from the attractively landscaped to the somewhat more basic, with lots of galvanised steel on display.
This is the sort of thing that will surely be upgraded before long to match the improvements in the rest of the waterfront.
The other thing that needs to be tackled, evident in a lot of the photos of newer buildings, is modern Auckland’s seeming addiction to drab colours, or absence of colour more precisely.
This is very obvious when you compare our newer buildings to the warm brick of the older ones they dwarf, such as the Ferry Building in the following photo of the Viaduct Harbour.
For more on Auckland and the North Island of New Zealand in general, check out my award-winning book The Neglected North Island, so called because the South Island is generally the more touristy part of the country! It’s available from my website, a-maverick.com.
Subscribe to our mailing list to receive free giveaways!
