Dining on Bug's Bunny's oven-roasted crown jewels in the Puke Ariki restaurant yesterday, it struck me that my current location, New Plymouth in Auckland, is not unlike Margate. Population 49,000. Right on the sea.
There the similarity ends, however. From my luxury suite on the waterfront, I can see joggers running along the new, 8km promenade they've just built. Boutique hotels, restaurants and B&Bs are springing up everywhere, with enough cafés to delight even the most hardened caffiend. Shops, galleries and public amenities abound.
According to the waitress who served up the knackers last night, this transformation from a rather dowdy port, 200 miles along an A road from anywhere else worth mentioning, to a thriving, bustling city has taken less than a decade.
I bet the Kiwis didn't spend £8m just thinking about it, either.
5 comments:
And a cricket ground to die for!
Check out Pukekura Park before you move on.
Truly an amazing transformation! But even more stunning is that New Plymouth has apparently travelled 300 km up the East Coast to Auckland.
Now if you can only get those canny Kiwi engineers to tow the Isle of Thanet to the Caribbean ...
...or Margate to the South of the Island to stop them banging on about how lovely it is there and tidy things up a bit in the North, to boot.
I've checked it out, Willie, and it truly is the perfect pitch! Although I'm sure it would look even more splendid in the sun, as opposed to the monsoon that appears to have settled in over New Plymouth.
As the residents of New Plymouth used to say (before it was apparently relocated to Auckland):
If you can see Mount Egmont, it's going to rain. If you can't see it, it's already raining.
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