Te Araroa Day 21, Auckland Botanical Gardens to Mangere Bridge

Starting km: 645
Finishing km: 618
km walked today: 27


For the next couple of days I decided that it would be slightly simpler if I was walking back into central Auckland rather than away from it.  So I took a bus out to the furthest point on the trail accessible by public transport, near Auckland's Botanical Gardens (which are, incidentally way far out of town and not nearly as nice or interesting as Wellington's), and walked back towards the city.

Curiously, after a bit of a wander through residential areas the trail takes you pretty much straight past the Auckland airport, where Sarah and I had sitting sipping our airport beer just 3 weeks previously.  In an area of the airport just off a busy road that pretty much no casual visitors would wander past I found this (still very well tended) memorial to the crew of the Air New Zealand sightseeing flight that crashed into Mt. Erebus in Antarctica in 1979.

After the airport the route found its way back into surprisingly rural terrain, including this area whose local residents (as well as the descendents of its historical residents and others) are very much against it being turned into a new residential subdivision.

This day finished off with a walk around the Auckland water treatment plant.  It was actually a really pleasant walk.  The air (somehow) felt like I was walking through a giant laundry dryer: slightly warm, slightly humid with an inexplicable almost fabric softener-y smell.  There were some nice visual and aural surroundings too, with huge numbers of wading and shorebirds.  Black swans, oystercatchers, stilts, paradise duck(ling!)s and this huge flock of barred godwits.

I had a bit of a challenge getting home at the end of the day, as my phone had died and I'm really not that great with Auckland geography.  Eventually I just found a bus stop, got on the first bus to come along.  It was going slightly the wrong way, but I eventually made it to a train station and back to the hotel well after dark.  (This also explains why I didn't get the "end of the day map screenshot."  It was just at the south side of the big pond on this map where I stopped for the day.