Visit Auckland Museum: part war museum and part island culture.

Drizzle with intermittent heavy rains. Judy drives us up, down and around Auckland’s many volcanic hills — do you sense a theme? — to the Auckland Museum. There is no special price for seniors but the handsome attendant gives us 20-percent off and we walk through the entrance to see a huge whare (Maori meeting house), walk through its ornately carved entrance, avoid the hobbit-like kids darting in every direction, and stare at the many carved columns along the interior walls that hold up the roof. The Maori had no writing until the Europeans came so their history, their culture is oral and sculpted: their lives literally writ large in wood and stone.

The ground floor of the museum — the building originally constructed as a monument to New Zealand’s war dead — is just chock-a-block with war canoes, amulets, spears, clubs, tatami, carvings, bronze busts of famous Maori chiefs and queens, and we remember to wash our hands in the special font so we do not take the sacred essence of Maori objects with us as we leave for the top floors, which surround marble walls engraved with the names of the dead. One panel is poignantly blank but for its single inscription (see photo).

Judy picks us up — our personal chauffeur — and takes us up, down and around Auckland’s many volcanic hills to the Wallace Arts Museum, a 1879 wooden mansion with a wrap-around porch on a hilltop. Beautiful old house with exactly the kind of ultra-modern art that makes NO sense whatsoever to David.