Four days in Auckland: every hill is a volcano and every road ends at water

Three nights on the isthmus: a national museum with a thirty five metre war canoe in it, a crater above the suburbs, a ferry to an island of vineyards, and a fort dug into a headland.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Auckland
Places
9 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Auckland sits on an isthmus barely a kilometre and a half wide at its narrowest, with the Pacific on one side and the Tasman on the other, and it is punched through by about fifty volcanoes. They are small, they are extinct or dormant rather than dead, and most of them are now public parks with roads up them. This is a city where you climb a crater to get a view of the suburbs, and the suburbs are full of more craters.

It holds a million and a half people, roughly a third of New Zealand and more than the entire South Island, and more Polynesians than any other city anywhere including the islands themselves. That shows up in the food, the language on the street, the churches and the museum, which is the single best introduction to the Pacific you will find.

Four days is right if two of them get on a boat. The Hauraki Gulf is full of islands and the ferries are frequent and cheap, and the difference between Auckland seen from Queen Street and Auckland seen from the water is the whole point of the place.

Highlights

  • A Māori war canoe thirty five metres long, carved from a single tree, indoors
  • Standing on the rim of a fifty metre crater with the whole city around it
  • Waiheke, forty minutes by ferry, where the vineyards run down to the beach
  • Victorian gun tunnels under a headland, unlit, that you can walk into
  • Ferries every twenty minutes to somewhere better than where you are standing

Where to stay

Auckland, three nights on the isthmus

Stay in the centre near Britomart and the ferry terminal, or in Ponsonby ten minutes west. Britomart puts you a hundred metres from every ferry you will catch; Ponsonby is a strip of restored villas with the best restaurants in the city and a twenty minute walk downhill.

Avoid booking anything that requires a car park in the centre unless you have to. Parking is expensive, the motorways clog twice a day, and everything below is reachable without one.

Day by day

Day 1 in Auckland

Up the tower, then the gallery below it

Auckland reads badly from the ground on a first afternoon. The centre is a slope of office towers and the harbour keeps disappearing behind them, so the first thing to do is get above it.

The Sky Tower is 328 metres, the tallest free-standing structure in the southern hemisphere, and on a clear day the view runs eighty kilometres. What you are looking for is the shape of the place: the two harbours on either side, the cones of the volcanoes scattered through the suburbs, and the islands of the gulf lined up to the north east. Twenty minutes up there and the rest of the trip makes sense. People also jump off it on a wire, which you can watch from the observation deck.

Then walk five minutes downhill to the art gallery, which holds the largest collection in New Zealand and had a very good extension built over it in kauri and glass. The rooms of Goldie and Lindauer portraits, painted from life in the late 1800s, are the ones people stand in front of longest.

Eat in Britomart or walk up to Ponsonby.

  1. 15:00

    Sky Tower

    Architecture

    The tallest thing standing anywhere south of the equator, and the fastest way to understand the shape of the city. Go up in clear weather or not at all. There is a revolving restaurant if you want to make an evening of it.

  2. 16:30

    Auckland Art Gallery

    Culture

    The country's largest art collection, in a heritage building with a kauri and glass canopy grafted onto it. Free general entry. The nineteenth century Māori portraits are the reason to come.

  3. 19:00

    Dinner on Ponsonby Road

    Eat

    Twenty minutes uphill west of the centre, and the best concentration of restaurants in Auckland. Book on a Friday or Saturday.

With more time: The park immediately below the gallery is Victorian, full of specimen trees and a floral clock, and it climbs to the university. It is the pleasantest ten minutes in the middle of the city and almost nobody walks through it.

Day 2 in Auckland

The museum on the volcano, then the crater above the suburbs

The Auckland War Memorial Museum stands on the highest point of a 75 hectare park that is itself an extinct volcano, and despite the name it is a general museum whose Māori and Pacific holdings have no equal anywhere. The centrepiece is a war canoe carved from a single totara log, more than thirty five metres long, kept indoors. There are daily Māori cultural performances on the ground floor: song, haka, and an explanation of what you are about to look at, and it is worth timing your arrival to one.

The top floor is the war memorial proper, built in the 1920s, with the names cut into the stone. It is quiet and it is the part most visitors skip.

Walk down through the park afterwards. The winter gardens halfway down are two Edwardian glasshouses around a sunken courtyard, free to enter, and the fernery behind them is in an old quarry.

Then take a bus three kilometres south to Mount Eden. It is the highest natural point in Auckland at 196 metres, the crater at the top is fifty metres deep and grassed, and the view is a full circle. You cannot walk into the crater itself, which is a sacred site, but the rim path is open and the terraces cut into the slopes by the pre-European fortified village are still clearly visible.

  1. 09:30

    Auckland War Memorial Museum

    Culture

    Free for New Zealand residents, ticketed for visitors, and worth it. the Pacific and tangata whenua galleries on the ground floor with daily cultural performances, natural history above, and the war memorial at the top. Three hours.

  2. 12:30

    Auckland Domain

    Leisure

    75 hectares on an extinct volcano, with the museum on the summit and the Edwardian winter gardens on the slope below. The glasshouses and the fernery are free and take half an hour.

  3. 15:00

    Mount Eden / Maungawhau

    Other

    196 metres, a fifty metre crater, and a 360 degree view. Walk up rather than drive: the road to the summit has been closed to cars for years. The terraces on the slopes are pre-European earthworks.

With more time: The other cone worth climbing is five kilometres further south, in a working sheep and cattle farm inside the city, with an obelisk on top marking the grave of one of Auckland's founders. Between them the two hills give you the whole volcanic field, and the farm is free and open until dusk.

Day 3 in Auckland

Waiheke, forty minutes across the gulf

Waiheke is the reason Aucklanders put up with Auckland. The ferry leaves from the downtown wharves, takes forty minutes, and lands you in a place with a different climate: drier, warmer, and covered in vineyards, olive groves and bays.

There is a bus network from the wharf and it works, though most people hire a scooter or an e-bike for the day. Start at Oneroa, the main village on the ridge above the first beach, which has the galleries and the cafes and a long north facing stretch of sand below it.

Lunch is the fixed point of a Waiheke day. There are around thirty vineyards on the island, several of them with restaurants on terraces looking back at the city thirty kilometres away across the water, and booking is essential in summer and sensible otherwise.

In the afternoon cross to Onetangi, which is the island's best beach: nearly two kilometres of north facing sand with almost nothing built on it. If you would rather walk than swim, there is a headland of Second World War gun emplacements at the far end of Waiheke, with tunnels cut through the rock underneath and a track to it through farmland.

  1. 09:00

    Ferry from the downtown terminal

    Travel

    Forty minutes, running roughly every hour and more often at weekends. Take the HOP card. Cars cost a fortune to bring across, so leave yours behind.

  2. 10:15

    Oneroa Beach

    Visit

    The main beach, below the village on the ridge, north facing and sheltered. Ten minutes on the bus from the wharf. Swim first, before the day gets away from you.

  3. 12:30

    Lunch at a vineyard

    Eat

    Several of the island's thirty odd vineyards have restaurants on terraces facing back at the city. Book ahead, particularly between December and March.

  4. 15:00

    Onetangi Beach

    Other

    The best swimming on Waiheke: a long open curve facing north, with almost nothing built behind it. The western end is clothes optional and often cut off at high tide.

With more time: At the far eastern end of the island, a track through farmland leads to a complex of coastal gun emplacements and tunnels from the Second World War, cut into a headland with nothing else around. It is a 1.2 kilometre walk from the road and takes a couple of hours out of the day, so pick it or the second beach rather than both.

Day 4 in Auckland

Twelve minutes to Devonport, and a hill with a gun in it

The best last morning in Auckland costs the price of a ferry ticket. Devonport is directly across the harbour, the crossing takes twelve minutes, and the village at the other end is a street of Victorian shopfronts, second hand bookshops and cafes with the naval base next door.

Two volcanic cones sit behind it and both are short walks. Mount Victoria is the higher and easier, a stroll up a suburban street to a grassed summit with the whole harbour laid out and a disappearing gun near the top: installed in 1899 against a Russian invasion that never came, and fired exactly once.

North Head, on the point at the harbour mouth, is the better one. The whole headland was hollowed out between the 1880s and the Second World War, and the tunnels, magazines and gun pits are open and largely unlit. Bring a torch, go into them, and come out on the seaward side looking at the volcanic island filling the middle of the gulf.

The ferry back drops you at the terminal, twenty minutes from the airport bus.

  1. 09:30

    Climb to the top of Mount Victoria

    Visit

    An easy walk up from the village to a grassed cone with a full harbour view. The disappearing gun near the summit went in during an 1899 Russian scare and was fired once.

  2. 11:00

    North Head

    Nature

    A honeycombed headland at the mouth of the harbour: tunnels, magazines and gun emplacements, open and mostly unlit. Take a torch. The view from the seaward side is the best in the city.

  3. 13:00

    Lunch on Victoria Road before the ferry back

    Eat

    The village street runs straight down to the wharf and has a dozen options. Boats back to the city leave every half hour.

With more time: With a full day rather than a morning, take a different ferry instead. The young volcano that fills the view north from the waterfront erupted about six hundred years ago, has no soil worth speaking of, and is covered in the largest pohutukawa forest anywhere. It is twenty five minutes across and an hour's climb to the summit, and there are lava caves on the way.

Before you go

Getting in and getting around

Auckland Airport is twenty two kilometres south of the centre on the Manukau Harbour and takes forty five minutes to reach in traffic. A shuttle costs around $35 and a fixed price taxi is similar. There is an airport bus into the city, which is the cheap option.

In the city, buy a HOP card. It covers buses, trains and, crucially, the ferries, and it is substantially cheaper than paying cash on each. Two of the four days here are ferry days.

You do not need a car. The centre is walkable if you accept the hills, the museum and Mount Eden are short bus rides, and the ferries all leave from the same terminal at the bottom of Queen Street. Hire one only if you want to drive out to the west coast beaches.

When to go

Auckland is subtropical and humid, and its winter is mild rather than cold: July days sit around fifteen degrees with a lot of rain. Summer runs from December to February, hot and busy, with the city half empty in January because everybody has gone to a beach somewhere else.

February and March are the best months. The sea is at its warmest, the weather is settled, and the crowds of the Christmas holidays have gone home. The old local line about four seasons in one day applies here too, so carry a jacket in any month.

Eating and drinking

Eat Pacific and Asian food. Auckland does both better than anywhere else in the country, and the good versions are in the suburbs rather than the waterfront: Dominion Road for Chinese, Sandringham for Indian, Otahuhu and Mangere for Samoan and Tongan.

In the centre, the food halls in the converted commercial buildings off Queen Street and the Britomart quarter near the ferry terminal are where the city eats at lunchtime. The coffee is uniformly good and served without ceremony, which is the New Zealand standard.

Auckland gets less love than it deserves, usually from people who spent one night here before flying to Queenstown. Seen from Queen Street it is an ordinary provincial business district on a hill. Seen from a ferry, or from the rim of one of the craters the suburbs are built around, it is a city scattered across fifty volcanoes between two harbours, with an island for every day of the week.

Four days is enough to work out which of those two cities you are in. Both are there; only one is visible from the pavement.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is Auckland worth four days, or should I go straight south?
Four days works if two of them are on the water. Auckland's own centre is the least interesting part of it and a day covers that; the islands, the volcanoes and the museum are what justify the rest. If you only have two days, do the museum and Waiheke.
Waiheke or Rangitoto?
Waiheke for beaches, vineyards and a full day out. The volcanic island is for the walk: a bare lava field, a summit climb of about an hour, and no shops, so take your own food and water. If the weather is good and you like walking, do the volcano.
Do I need a car?
Not for this plan. Buses, trains and ferries on one HOP card cover all of it. Hire a car only if you want the west coast surf beaches, where the sand is black and the currents are dangerous, or if you are driving south afterwards anyway.
How do I see Māori culture properly here?
Start at the museum, which has the collection and daily performances, and treat it as an introduction rather than the whole thing. The deeper experiences are further south around Rotorua, where the tourism is run by the iwi whose land it is.
Is it always raining?
It rains a lot, in short bursts, all year, and the weather turns fast. It is rarely cold. Plan around it rather than for it, and keep the museum in reserve for the day the ferry looks miserable.