Tour wonderful art museum and Anglican Church

More gray scudding clouds with intermittent rain so Judy drives us up, down and around Auckland’s many volcanic hills to the Art Gallery, an architectural marvel made to look like kauri trees whose impossibly tall light brown trunks rise to a wooden canopy. A spry guide named Jackie gives us a wonderful instructed tour of the highlights, telling marvelous stories with great detail. As she shows us Charles Goldie oils of Maoris, she explains their facial tattoos.

Those on the right side of the face represent the mother’s lineage and tribal history — easy to remember, she says, because your mother is always right — and the father’s is on the left. The design between the upper lip and nose is your own unique spirit. Unfortunately, the museum has no postcards of the Goldie’s and photos are forbidden because his descendants guard the rights.

The small beautiful painting of volcanic mountains surrounding a bay in the next room is the first oil painting known of New Zealand. It was done on a piece of pine board given by Captain Cook’s Endeavor carpenter to William Hodges who included Cook’s lieutenant in a dory in the foreground, so small you must be told to look for it, but so detailed you can see the epaulettes on his red uniform.

Evidently, Jackie tells us, Cook’s navigator was a Society Islander named Tupaia, an accomplished cartographer and linguist who attached himself to the Endeavor when it moored for a while in Tahiti. Cook didn’t want to take him on until the expedition’s chief botanist, Joseph Banks, said he would pay for Tupaia’s passage. Turns out that was a good move since he understood the nature of Maori greetings, which had previously been misinterpreted as imminent attacks and led to massacres, and could, literally, talk to the natives and let Cook’s crew know they were safe.

A member of the guided tour approaches Cynthia and asks, “I don’t mean to be intrusive, but where did you get your, ahh, tans?” A pointed question because Cynthia and I must be the only people currently in town with sunburned faces. But sunburned we are … David a bright red with a peeling forehead, and Cynthia developing small blisters on the back of her delicate, Botticelli-esque neck.

To Holy Trinity Cathedral — large, austerely impressive, many photos of Bishop Selwyn and his wife, who MUST have been a truly long-suffering soul — and Saint Mary’s Church — moved in its massive entirety across the street in 1982 — in the afternoon before we meet John and Roberta with Judy for dinner at Meadows, a delightful restaurant a three-minute walk from Judy’s house on Remuera Drive. The restaurant serves a Marlborough region Pinot Noir named Roaring Meg, which Carol Wisker recommended (see wine notes).