I had a Wattie’s microwave Chili con Carne with rice for breakfast. Not bad, on par with Rainbow Drive-in.
We walked out to more opportunity shops (=thrift stores). This is a high traffic tourist area, so there weren’t really any bargains. Mostly upscale merchandise.
Auckland downtown has quite a few hills, and shadowy streets from tall buildings. It’s reminiscent of San Francisco, except that the hills are not quite as steep. There are a LOT of visitors. People with full backpacks or pulling luggage are a common sight.These lockboxes are common in the city. I’m guessing that a lot of people rent out their apartments.
We stopped for lunch at a food court, and chose a Malaysian place.
Merrianne enjoys a Laksa.We came upon a square with pigeons.Once they understood that I planned to feed them, they started swarming.They landed on my arms, my shoulder, my pack. It didn’t hurt; they were soft.Auckland is the only place on our trip so far that we’ve seen people on the street like this. Some were just sleeping, some were asking for donations. They seem to have a cup or bowl out for money in such a case, and are not aggressive. No one actively asked us for anything.This courier was delivering packages by bicycle.I thought that I heard two loud bangs while we were waiting for lunch, but Merrianne says I couldn’t possibly have heard this accident from blocks away. A parked tour bus rolled backwards down a hill, mowing down a mother with a baby in a stroller. Amazingly, both survived relatively unscathed. The baby went exactly between the wheels, and bystanders retrieved it from under the front of the bus. The mother was retrieved from the back. This was all over the news that evening.
We found the local i-Site visitor centre. It was not as simple to locate as the Rotorua one. In this large city, things get lost in the weeds of every shop aggressively advertising. We were looking for maps and metro cards, which turned out to be at the train station a couple blocks away.
We were tired by the time we got back to the room. I walked out and got a lamb over rice plate from a nearby Turkish place to split between us.
