Mount Eden is one of the inner suburbs, with quiet streets (are there any others in this country?) lined with larger houses than most others we’ve seen, with gardens, and a little so-called village in the London sense which is far more compact than the other commercial zones we’ve. It felt a bit like Hampstead. We went to Olaf’s, a bakery/cafe, which looked excellent but was sadly not so great and I think this was at least partially due to service. All the food was several degrees cooler than it should have been, and so tasted tired, as though it had been waiting for a waiter to bring it over. Although the cakes looked excellent this put us off so we went elsewhere for strong but very good lattes. Then we walked up Mount Eden itself, which is the tallest of Auckland’s many extinct volcanoes and was (and is) a Maori sacred site. There was a so-called bush path which led steeply up the sides and then turned very steep indeed so I was almost climbing up – not great for the eczema on my hands which is especially bad today and made me worry about the way down as this was the first day I’d worn trainers instead of open sandals and was consequently feeling very protective of my toes. At the top it was beautiful. Auckland spread all around the grass covered knolls, the old terraces rising like waves over a central crater, with the sea and islands in the distance. The crater was beautiful. One is not allowed to venture into it, though it’s extinct, for conservation reasons and becauase it is a Maori site, but one could walk around the undulating rim and watch the waves run through the grass.
On the way down were some beautiful birds, singing, white-bearded blue tui and yellowhammers, and the singing of a fantail somewhere.
At a pub in Mount Eden we met a colleague of the Gentleman Friend’s, a likeable American woman who was having tea with her friends, all immigrants, and waiting for another friend who was moving away from New Zealand the very next day. One of the friends, the most likeable one, was a housesitter, a profession that seems quite common in NZ, as many households have small holiday houses or baches. Some of the others were a bit hard-eyed, and one worked her jaw in a strangely aggressive way, but behaved pleasantly otherwise. There was some talk of Zelda, which one person had taken up recently, and was the reason she’d been up till late last night.