Auckland I, Tāmaki Makaurau

Somehow I started New Zealand from the wrong side and am now working my way from beautiful to less beautiful, or at least that is my impression. I am deliberately not writing ugly, we are not in, well, you know. Why less beautiful? The South Island, and Queenstown in particular, are outstanding for me. Fjord landscape there, volcanic landscape here on the North Island. Where exactly the difference lies, one might ask. In the way one looks at it, I would answer.

The closer you get to Auckland, the more poor people you see, fat people, people in a hurry, cosmetically enhanced people, in short the signs of a metropolis. I had not really noticed it, but in the last four weeks I hardly saw any traffic lights, here they are everywhere again. Unlike the big neighbor, you know, the one whose name is not spoken, the pedestrian lights here at least switch immediately when you press them. With the neighbor, as a pedestrian or cyclist, you can wait for several minutes. It is the small things they do differently here. Better, in my opinion. Had I already mentioned the greater environmental awareness? Greater? Here it actually exists at all.

The step from Wellington, a city that is genuinely beautiful, via Taupō, yes, nice, to Auckland is not really a big one. But after four weeks away from a major city, it takes me a while before I can fit back into this pace and bustle. The bus ride was short, but somehow uncomfortable. More people, fatter people, poorer people on the bus than in the south. Down there the passengers were more likely to be tourists, here the bus is simply public transport. At some point in the afternoon I was dumped in the city center and for a moment felt completely disoriented among the urban canyons, until I managed to sort myself out again. Where is the sun, which street is where, ah yes, this way, good. It did not take long until I reached my accommodation, and then I had to work first. A lot keeps piling up at the moment, and the internet in this place is terrible.

Whatever. Went out again in the evening and took a few pictures at the harbor. I am staying centrally, and that is good. It reminds me a bit of Sydney, it has a Harbour Bridge, good ferries, and also something of Brisbane, with a Queen Street shopping strip. You come across those typical street names again that I already know, from her, you know who.

So Auckland is volcanic in origin as well. The volcanic field is still considered active, though an eruption in a city of this size is rather unlikely. The last one is dated to around 600 years ago, when Rangitoto apparently rose out of the sea. Six hundred years ago this area had long already been settled by Māori, who found very fertile soils here on this narrow stretch of land between the seas. By around 1750, tens of thousands of people were already living here, and the area was considered one of the wealthiest and most densely populated centers of precolonial New Zealand. In 1840 the area was then colonized by the white man. Around the 1990s Auckland became a city of a million, today nearly 1.8 million people live here. Rapid growth that does not happen without leaving its marks. Auckland has not simply kept spreading outward, it has above all become denser. That is how roughly 800,000 more people could be added since the 1990s without the whole city feeling like a single giant megacity. That said, you still ride through suburbs for a very long time when you come into town by bus. Delightful.

The next morning. I still had lots to deal with and was really only looking for a coffee, but did not find one quickly. So back again to that American chain. At least the internet is good there and the espresso is better than what is otherwise on offer here. After that I walked a little through Albert Park and suddenly found myself standing in front of the Art Gallery, an architecturally really beautiful building, and went in. Free admission, and on the inside too, architecture at its finest. Beautiful exhibitions. I normally find portrait sections rather boring. In Europe you usually see the pale likenesses of aristocratic products of inbreeding, oops, can one say that? Probably not. But anyone who has once looked into the Spanish Habsburg case, homozygosity, or the bleeding disease, hemophilia, and its spread through matriarch Victoria, whose descendants married with remarkable enthusiasm into European dynasties, knows what I mean. Evolution biology i like it. Ah yes, it is no longer quite like that today, now they are only a little more distantly related. One does not degenerate quite so quickly that way, right Andrew? I digress.

In any case, in this gallery the portraits are Māori faces with their tattoos. For a European-shaped fellow like me that is a small culture shock, one I observe with pleasure. It looks so unfamiliar, so unfamiliar and yet so good. So yes, that too is highly recommended. I liked the gallery, which sits somewhere between the modern and the classical.

I ended the day with a ferry ride to Devonport. I had actually wanted to head straight back, but the ferry, like with many others, asked me to get off. A pure sightseeing ride is therefore not possible. You have to disembark. That is a bit clumsily handled, I have seen it done better elsewhere. Still, I took the opportunity, had a look around, and climbed Mount Victoria before taking the ferry back. All in all, a rather relaxed day.

In the evening I then fixed the next few weeks and turned thought into action. I do not particularly love having to commit myself for that long, but this time there was no other way. The Iran war makes it necessary. I booked, and after booking I realized I had made a mistake. One destination is relatively large compared with the amount of time I plan to spend there. Ah well. Focus.

Today too I took it easy. I had work in the morning, and during the night they changed the clocks, daylight saving, which has me completely mixed up with the time again. After that I was once more looking for good coffee. Again I had to go to the chain, where they now know me by my Starbucks name, PeeeTa, really Peter, but who cares. Afterwards I made my way again through Albert Park to the Auckland Domain, a huge park, past the playing fields where assemblies used to be held, and into the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Me and a war museum, but it is more than that. Here I had to buy a ticket and was immediately forced into a conversation with the woman selling it. She was very nice and wanted to know where I was from and so on, and it struck me that this was probably my first proper conversation in days. Since leaving Taupō I have hardly spoken to anyone at all, apart from tactical coffee orders. For three days I had been trapped in my carousel of thoughts, and what can I say, it was bearable. I keep stopping at some of the stations of the last two and a half years, getting out, looking around, but I still manage to get back in and continue rather than remain stuck. Well then, eventually the lady released me and I was allowed into the exhibitions.

There I learned a great deal about Auckland and its settlement. There was another one of those interactive tables, excellent. They really can do museums here in New Zealand, much better than, well, you know where. Highly recommended, the whole thing. Fine, the top floor consists of the wars New Zealand was dragged into, empire thanks for that. Even so, it was more a mixture of exhibition and memorial.

What I took away from this museum, or rather what impressed me, was once again the Māori exhibition, as well as the presentation of how various animals and plants even managed to get to New Zealand in the first place, and the Auckland-specific exhibition. And here, for the first time, I recognized a parallel between individual states. New Zealand is nuclear free, and there is a reason for that. It is the rejection of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific by the French and the Americans. One of the high points of this story was probably the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland in 1985, I myself do remember that.

And to be fair, we grew up near Mutlangen during the Cold War. The rejection of nuclear power was never rooted in nuclear power alone, even though that is always twisted around afterwards. The rejection, and also the emergence of the Greens, came from the fact that we all knew that the moment the Cold War turned hot, we would be among the first to be bombed away. That is where the rejection came from. 1986, a summer spent shut inside, did the rest. New Zealand turned this into an identity-forming security doctrine, Germany mainly into a nuclear phase-out. As for NATO’s nuclear deterrence, Germany is still part of that, in that sense.

P.S.

Hardly anyone objects to the civilian use of radioactivity in medicine, industry, and research, meaning material testing, process measurement technology, sterilization, silicon doping, and isotope production. Research reactors are part of that, even if from the perspective of proliferation they are not entirely unproblematic, because some of these facilities were historically operated with highly enriched uranium. Greetings to Garching. That is precisely why skepticism toward large-scale nuclear power is politically understandable, especially since countries like New Zealand explicitly developed their nuclear-free stance out of their experience with the darker sides of this technology.

In Germany, the phase-out after Fukushima in 2011 was the logical step. On June 30, 2011, the Bundestag voted 513 in favor, 79 against, with 8 abstentions, for the amendment of the Atomic Energy Act. The phase-out path was thereby fixed until 2022. Today, it is precisely those people who do not want to see a wind turbine anywhere near them who are trying to reverse that course. Nuclear power, yes please, but the repository can go somewhere else.

Then they bring up new reactor types, and yes, they are often designed with additional passive safety functions, but a residual risk always remains, and spent fuel is still highly radioactive and has to be shielded and managed at great effort. Economically the picture is sobering: keeping existing nuclear plants running usually comes in at below 40 USD/MWh, new nuclear construction more around 40 to 80 USD/MWh, with one current US model for advanced new nuclear at 81.45 USD/MWh. New renewables are generally below that, around 29.58 USD/MWh for onshore wind, 31.86 USD/MWh for solar, and 37.58 USD/MWh for geothermal.

For comparison, gas in new build comes in roughly here: new combined cycle gas plant 64.55 USD/MWh, new gas peaker using combustion turbine 133.88 USD/MWh.

Interesting. One really does not have to be a genius to see what has more of a future.