What I did on my holidays
My lovely girlfriend (MLG) and I almost supernaturally arrived at our second anniversary recently, and I’ve just had one of those birthdays that’s no longer assigned a number because I’m on the upper side of 40. We decided it was time to surprise one another with a celebratory treat.
The problem was, we both chose the same surprise: a weekend for two at the Auckland Hilton. MLG selected a Friday night with cocktails at Bellini, while I plumped for a Saturday night including dinner at White. Surprise! Not really. But MLG also had an outstanding Christmas voucher for a facial at the nearby Servilles Day Spa, so a bit of self-inflicted TLC in venues of our mutual choosing was in order. Fortunately, the travel company allowed us to combine our packages: a bumper weekend with all the upmarket trimmings, and everyone was happy with the probable exception of my banker. Miserable git.
What made this holiday unusual — aside from it being rare for us to give ourselves time off from parenting and our respective daily grinds — is that we live a few miles away from our destination. Coals to Newcastle, perhaps; a busman’s holiday; a perverse 21st Century twist on the “weekend at the bach”... at least no queuing was involved, and we could carry any bloody hand luggage we wanted.
I admit, after living in and around central Auckland for years, I’ve had phases during which I’ve felt I was ‘over’ the city life. And I’d never have dreamt when I arrived in New Zealand that, the better part of a decade later, I’d still be running the rat-race in more or less the same way as I did in Europe.
For many workers, nothing less than an annual fortnight on a sun-lounger on Fiji or waist-deep at the cocktail bar in a Maldives resort swimming pool would provide the required degree of torpor. But further afield would be going too far — we couldn’t abandon our eleven-year-old with his grandparents for more than a couple of days, and the alternative (to take him with us) was too traumatic for any of us contemplate. Then there was the travelling time, and work to come back to at the end of it.
No, a couple of days pretending to be rich would have to do us just fine.
I’ve travelled large tracts of the globe and stayed in hotels of varying degrees of luxury and shabbiness. But when it comes to rooms I’m of the opinion that little separates a cheap, basic one from its more expensive alternatives. Clean and comfortable you have a right to expect, but unique selling points are few and far between.
Sure, sometimes you have a nice view and a chocolate stuck on your pillow at “turndown time”. You might even be offered lots of stealable, monogrammed swag; satellite or cable TV; and a trouser press (whatever happened to those?). But you get most of those features in a bog-standard Kiwi motel these days and fresh milk, as well.
Only real, five-star hotels — those in which every room is a suite — can be said to offer the guest truly luxurious accommodation; and I don’t care whether the place you’re staying in calls itself a “boutique hotel experience”, you’re going to be hard-pressed to have a more comfortable time than you would at home.
So I wasn’t as disappointed as MLG by the compact, modestly appointed room. But I have stayed in far cheaper motel rooms that seemed as well equipped; and while the Hilton bathroom was large and moodily lit, there was no spa bath, and the smoked glass door, while classy in appearance, didn’t close completely, let alone lock. Personally, I don’t hold with this modern laissez-faire attitude towards bodily functions. Give me privacy any day of the week.
There was a well-stocked mini bar, the usual over-priced snacks, broadband internet access (that seemed reluctant to work) and an impressive array of room service and other luxury hotel facilities. But the air conditioning was crude (the one fan was situated above the shower), suggesting the bedroom would be unbearably hot in summer, and our exterior balcony walls were already showing signs of mildew. White walls are all very well but are a nightmare to maintain in a rainy climate like Auckland’s.
Worse still, the lap-pool on the Hilton’s roof has been out of action since July and there was no prospect of the A-Team bringing it back into action during our brief stay. There had been no mention of this curtailed service when we made our bookings, or when we checked in. When we queried this unavailability we were offered (expired) vouchers for the Tepid Baths down the road. Even had the vouchers been valid, it would sadly have been too late for us to take advantage of them.
After a pleasant Friday night of cocktails and antipasto in Bellini, we woke to found that we had no hot water in our room. By lunchtime the fault had still not been repaired. By way of compensation, we received from the apologetic management a bottle of Palliser Estate 2004 Martinborough chardonnay. But the best was yet to come.
At White, for our Saturday night anniversary dinner, we won a choice window table and the service was attentive while not making us feel nervous about not being stinking rich. A high point of the meal was a menu-prompted wine match for the wild rabbit loin entrée on a confit of pickled rhubarb and chorizo with red wine verjus. The wine was a Syrah (I think a CJ Pask ‘Gimblett Gravels’, Hawkes Bay, 2001). In any case, the combination was breathtakingly good.
But I didn’t set out to write just another a hotel review. There was something about this weekend far more fundamental than the quality of our hotel room and the standard of service; something I hadn’t really taken into consideration until we got there (no, not that).
There are many aspects of any holiday that are completely beyond your control, just as happy accidents always happen that have no place on your itinerary. On this weekend the weather was disappointing, not to say abysmal. It rained virtually non-stop and if MLG hadn’t asked to go shopping on Saturday afternoon following our Servilles Spa facials, we might have spent the entire weekend on the ‘island’ of Princes Wharf (and that’s the plural of prince, not princess, as I’ve heard even Trelise Cooper, who should know better since she has a shop on the wharf, call it).
Instead of moping in our room, listening to the sub-aquatic rumble of the Asian freighter tied to the dock opposite, we borrowed the hotel room’s enormous golfing brolly and slithered and skittered like tourists along the treacherously slippery causeway alongside the hotel and to the ‘mainland’ of the city centre.
There’s much to be said for seeing an everyday thing from a once-in-a-lifetime perspective. A stroll with the person you love through any city centre on holiday is a million miles from the chore of regular shopping, and this didn’t feel like any Queen Street shopping expedition I’ve been on while living here. It was a vacation from the real thing; more like ambling through the ninth arrondissement in autumn, or along Seventh Avenue on Christmas Eve than the sterile duty that mall shopping in Auckland has become.
Lately, I’ve been working on Queen Street, only occasionally heading out for lunchtime sushi or onto Lorne Street for a coffee at Sheinkin. But familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt; as we walked through Queen’s Arcade at the bottom of Queen Street, we might just as well have been in Milan or in London’s Mayfair, but maybe that was just the rain.
I remember that little coffee shop (Custom Coffee House) at the north-eastern end of Queen’s Arcade from my first New Zealand holidays, although I don’t recall ever stopping in there for a coffee before now. It has something reassuringly 1950s about it; it set my mind spinning back to the metal ice cream bowls in an Italian coffee bar in Ulverston, Cumbria in the 1960s; and a cappuccino place I used to go to for cheap lunches, around the corner from London’s Carnaby Street in the 1980s.
The higgledy-piggedly shop layout showcases a dungeon-like array of stovetop coffeepots and a cabinet of tantalising snacks (why do so many cafés sell slabs of flaky, congealed grease and claim they’re sausage rolls?), and the coffee was possibly the best I’ve had in Auckland outside of the consistently good Baretta on Dominion Road.
The only other guest at the time MLG and I dropped into Queen’s Arcade for a revitalising latte, sandwich and slice of cake on Saturday afternoon was an elderly gentlemen engrossed in his newspaper; possibly a shopkeeper from one of the neighbouring stores. “That’s the sort of coffee that gets you to the top of mountains!” he suddenly exclaimed, presumably by way of praise. Apparently, that’s the usual kind of customer feedback experienced here because it didn’t even raise an eyebrow behind the counter.
After a walk between the raindrops along Queen Street, we punished my credit card at Unity Books, called in at Pauanesia for MLG, serpentined through the shops of Little High Street and even the Downtown Warehouse before heading back to the Hilton to get ready for dinner.
And in spite of the world-class food and service at White (the scrambled eggs I had for breakfast on Sunday morning were the best I’ve eaten anywhere), it’ll be that walk in the rain around Queen Street I’ll always remember — not slurping cocktails in Bellini or pretending to be rich while waiting for the MLG’s car to be returned from valet parking.
It reinvigorated my view of the city I’ve lived in for almost a decade. And that’s a good thing.
When we’d recovered from the arduous drive back to Mount Eden, the parity of time zones and the inevitable culture clash of upscale dining at White and the colourful chaos of the kebab shop at the other end of our street, we discovered the Hilton had mailed us a personalised voucher for a free return night (including breakfast), to compensate us for our lack of hot water on Saturday morning. How old fashioned, and how very civilised.
We live five minutes away from the traffic on Dominion Road and yet I’m regularly astonished by the variety of trees visible from our veranda and the multiplicity of the morning chorus I wake to every morning. You can count on one hand the number of cities in the world in which you can still feel this close to nature so close to downtown. And I thank my brief home-from-home holiday in Auckland for reminding me how lucky I am. In American Sonnet, the poet Billy Collins writes about the curious love affair with picture postcards, as though vacationers want to chide those they’ve left behind:
The problem was, we both chose the same surprise: a weekend for two at the Auckland Hilton. MLG selected a Friday night with cocktails at Bellini, while I plumped for a Saturday night including dinner at White. Surprise! Not really. But MLG also had an outstanding Christmas voucher for a facial at the nearby Servilles Day Spa, so a bit of self-inflicted TLC in venues of our mutual choosing was in order. Fortunately, the travel company allowed us to combine our packages: a bumper weekend with all the upmarket trimmings, and everyone was happy with the probable exception of my banker. Miserable git.
What made this holiday unusual — aside from it being rare for us to give ourselves time off from parenting and our respective daily grinds — is that we live a few miles away from our destination. Coals to Newcastle, perhaps; a busman’s holiday; a perverse 21st Century twist on the “weekend at the bach”... at least no queuing was involved, and we could carry any bloody hand luggage we wanted.
I admit, after living in and around central Auckland for years, I’ve had phases during which I’ve felt I was ‘over’ the city life. And I’d never have dreamt when I arrived in New Zealand that, the better part of a decade later, I’d still be running the rat-race in more or less the same way as I did in Europe.
For many workers, nothing less than an annual fortnight on a sun-lounger on Fiji or waist-deep at the cocktail bar in a Maldives resort swimming pool would provide the required degree of torpor. But further afield would be going too far — we couldn’t abandon our eleven-year-old with his grandparents for more than a couple of days, and the alternative (to take him with us) was too traumatic for any of us contemplate. Then there was the travelling time, and work to come back to at the end of it.
No, a couple of days pretending to be rich would have to do us just fine.
I’ve travelled large tracts of the globe and stayed in hotels of varying degrees of luxury and shabbiness. But when it comes to rooms I’m of the opinion that little separates a cheap, basic one from its more expensive alternatives. Clean and comfortable you have a right to expect, but unique selling points are few and far between.
Sure, sometimes you have a nice view and a chocolate stuck on your pillow at “turndown time”. You might even be offered lots of stealable, monogrammed swag; satellite or cable TV; and a trouser press (whatever happened to those?). But you get most of those features in a bog-standard Kiwi motel these days and fresh milk, as well.
Only real, five-star hotels — those in which every room is a suite — can be said to offer the guest truly luxurious accommodation; and I don’t care whether the place you’re staying in calls itself a “boutique hotel experience”, you’re going to be hard-pressed to have a more comfortable time than you would at home.
So I wasn’t as disappointed as MLG by the compact, modestly appointed room. But I have stayed in far cheaper motel rooms that seemed as well equipped; and while the Hilton bathroom was large and moodily lit, there was no spa bath, and the smoked glass door, while classy in appearance, didn’t close completely, let alone lock. Personally, I don’t hold with this modern laissez-faire attitude towards bodily functions. Give me privacy any day of the week.
There was a well-stocked mini bar, the usual over-priced snacks, broadband internet access (that seemed reluctant to work) and an impressive array of room service and other luxury hotel facilities. But the air conditioning was crude (the one fan was situated above the shower), suggesting the bedroom would be unbearably hot in summer, and our exterior balcony walls were already showing signs of mildew. White walls are all very well but are a nightmare to maintain in a rainy climate like Auckland’s.
Worse still, the lap-pool on the Hilton’s roof has been out of action since July and there was no prospect of the A-Team bringing it back into action during our brief stay. There had been no mention of this curtailed service when we made our bookings, or when we checked in. When we queried this unavailability we were offered (expired) vouchers for the Tepid Baths down the road. Even had the vouchers been valid, it would sadly have been too late for us to take advantage of them.
After a pleasant Friday night of cocktails and antipasto in Bellini, we woke to found that we had no hot water in our room. By lunchtime the fault had still not been repaired. By way of compensation, we received from the apologetic management a bottle of Palliser Estate 2004 Martinborough chardonnay. But the best was yet to come.
At White, for our Saturday night anniversary dinner, we won a choice window table and the service was attentive while not making us feel nervous about not being stinking rich. A high point of the meal was a menu-prompted wine match for the wild rabbit loin entrée on a confit of pickled rhubarb and chorizo with red wine verjus. The wine was a Syrah (I think a CJ Pask ‘Gimblett Gravels’, Hawkes Bay, 2001). In any case, the combination was breathtakingly good.
But I didn’t set out to write just another a hotel review. There was something about this weekend far more fundamental than the quality of our hotel room and the standard of service; something I hadn’t really taken into consideration until we got there (no, not that).
There are many aspects of any holiday that are completely beyond your control, just as happy accidents always happen that have no place on your itinerary. On this weekend the weather was disappointing, not to say abysmal. It rained virtually non-stop and if MLG hadn’t asked to go shopping on Saturday afternoon following our Servilles Spa facials, we might have spent the entire weekend on the ‘island’ of Princes Wharf (and that’s the plural of prince, not princess, as I’ve heard even Trelise Cooper, who should know better since she has a shop on the wharf, call it).
Instead of moping in our room, listening to the sub-aquatic rumble of the Asian freighter tied to the dock opposite, we borrowed the hotel room’s enormous golfing brolly and slithered and skittered like tourists along the treacherously slippery causeway alongside the hotel and to the ‘mainland’ of the city centre.
There’s much to be said for seeing an everyday thing from a once-in-a-lifetime perspective. A stroll with the person you love through any city centre on holiday is a million miles from the chore of regular shopping, and this didn’t feel like any Queen Street shopping expedition I’ve been on while living here. It was a vacation from the real thing; more like ambling through the ninth arrondissement in autumn, or along Seventh Avenue on Christmas Eve than the sterile duty that mall shopping in Auckland has become.
Lately, I’ve been working on Queen Street, only occasionally heading out for lunchtime sushi or onto Lorne Street for a coffee at Sheinkin. But familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt; as we walked through Queen’s Arcade at the bottom of Queen Street, we might just as well have been in Milan or in London’s Mayfair, but maybe that was just the rain.
I remember that little coffee shop (Custom Coffee House) at the north-eastern end of Queen’s Arcade from my first New Zealand holidays, although I don’t recall ever stopping in there for a coffee before now. It has something reassuringly 1950s about it; it set my mind spinning back to the metal ice cream bowls in an Italian coffee bar in Ulverston, Cumbria in the 1960s; and a cappuccino place I used to go to for cheap lunches, around the corner from London’s Carnaby Street in the 1980s.
The higgledy-piggedly shop layout showcases a dungeon-like array of stovetop coffeepots and a cabinet of tantalising snacks (why do so many cafés sell slabs of flaky, congealed grease and claim they’re sausage rolls?), and the coffee was possibly the best I’ve had in Auckland outside of the consistently good Baretta on Dominion Road.
The only other guest at the time MLG and I dropped into Queen’s Arcade for a revitalising latte, sandwich and slice of cake on Saturday afternoon was an elderly gentlemen engrossed in his newspaper; possibly a shopkeeper from one of the neighbouring stores. “That’s the sort of coffee that gets you to the top of mountains!” he suddenly exclaimed, presumably by way of praise. Apparently, that’s the usual kind of customer feedback experienced here because it didn’t even raise an eyebrow behind the counter.
After a walk between the raindrops along Queen Street, we punished my credit card at Unity Books, called in at Pauanesia for MLG, serpentined through the shops of Little High Street and even the Downtown Warehouse before heading back to the Hilton to get ready for dinner.
And in spite of the world-class food and service at White (the scrambled eggs I had for breakfast on Sunday morning were the best I’ve eaten anywhere), it’ll be that walk in the rain around Queen Street I’ll always remember — not slurping cocktails in Bellini or pretending to be rich while waiting for the MLG’s car to be returned from valet parking.
It reinvigorated my view of the city I’ve lived in for almost a decade. And that’s a good thing.
When we’d recovered from the arduous drive back to Mount Eden, the parity of time zones and the inevitable culture clash of upscale dining at White and the colourful chaos of the kebab shop at the other end of our street, we discovered the Hilton had mailed us a personalised voucher for a free return night (including breakfast), to compensate us for our lack of hot water on Saturday morning. How old fashioned, and how very civilised.
We live five minutes away from the traffic on Dominion Road and yet I’m regularly astonished by the variety of trees visible from our veranda and the multiplicity of the morning chorus I wake to every morning. You can count on one hand the number of cities in the world in which you can still feel this close to nature so close to downtown. And I thank my brief home-from-home holiday in Auckland for reminding me how lucky I am. In American Sonnet, the poet Billy Collins writes about the curious love affair with picture postcards, as though vacationers want to chide those they’ve left behind:
“We locate an adjective for the weather.It’s good to get away from it all but it’s even better to remember how good it is to be here.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here
and hide the wish that we were where you are…”
