For the second part of my stay in Aotearoa (yes, that's the official Maori name for New Zealand, it means "long white clouds"), I moved to Auckland. It's much more populous than Wellington (roughly 1.5 million people versus not even 500 thousand people) and, fortunately, much warmer (the highest I got in Wellington was 20ºC, while in Auckland it was already around 28ºC). I rented a small apartment right in front of the iconic landmark Sky Tower (a 328-meter-tall communications tower).
The Auckland Art Gallery was a pleasant surprise, full of modern art. They had Braque, Cézanne, Dalí, Gauguin, Léger, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Rothko, de Kooning, Lichtenstein, Twombly, Warhol, and also little exhibitions dedicated to Giacometti (fifty lithographs from the series Paris Sans Fin) and Louise Bourgeois (various sculptures, including her famous spiders, plus a few lithographs), and one Kehinde Wiley portrait (a contemporary artist that always makes me smile). The building is also interesting, in a park full of gnarly trees and curious birds.
The Auckland War Memorial Museum is a fine museum too. The second floor is dedicated to the two world wars (including a real Japanese Zero and a real British Spitfire), while the ground floor covers natural history and ancient history. The best part for me was the Maori Cultural Experience, a live presentation of local traditions like the haka.
I also visited the New Zealand Maritime Museum (which is much smaller than the ones in Sydney or Barcelona, but still interesting) and the Weta Workshop Unleashed (which showcases the art of special effects but is based on fictional movies rather than the famous The Lord of the Rings trilogy).
And the food?
Food in Auckland was not very different from that in Wellington, with a mix of international cuisine (mostly Asian) and British-style pub dishes. I also ate a very good king crab pappardelle ricce, with brandy bisque crème fraîche, in a nice restaurant called Gilt.
Any side trips?
I took a day to go to Matamata, about two hours south of Auckland, to visit the famous Hobbiton, the place where Frodo Baggins and Bilbo Baggins lived in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. It's a lovely hobbit town constructed in the middle of a huge farm full of green hills and impressive trees. Most of what was built for the first trilogy had been destroyed by the time they started the second one, about ten years later, so they had to rebuild it. That's what we see today, as the place has been preserved as a tourism destination. Around it, it's still a working farm, with thousands of sheep and cows.
And after Auckland?
The next destination is Tahiti, more specifically Papeete, the capital city of French Polynesia. But that's a story for another time. Nana! (That's "bye-bye" in Tahitian.)
Happy 2026!