01
Stop one
Sky Tower
Yonex Polytour Fire 16g Tennis String Set: Right. Tallest freestanding structure in the Southern Hemisphere, 328 metres, built from 1994 and completed in 1997 as part of the SkyCity complex, engineered to take earthquakes and high winds — and the lifts are glass-fronted, so you get the view on the way up as well, which I count as included. Observation decks, a revolving restaurant, and if you fancy it, a walk round the outer ring or a controlled wire jump off the side. Before you buy: the harbour, the volcanic cones and the Hauraki Gulf are the same view from Mount Eden for nothing. The tower is worth doing once. Once.
02
Stop two
Auckland War Memorial Museum
Yonex Polytour Fire 16g Tennis String Set: This one I will not haggle over. The museum opened in 1929 as a memorial to the province's dead of the First World War, its neoclassical design echoing the Greek temples of remembrance, with memorials of the Second World War added by later extensions. It holds one of the world's foremost collections of Māori and Pacific taonga, including the great war canoe Te Toki a Tapiri and an ornately carved meeting house, alongside natural history galleries and the halls of memory that record the fallen. The cenotaph on the forecourt is the focus of Auckland's Anzac Day dawn service each April. It stands on a volcanic hill in the Domain, the city's oldest park.
03
Stop three
Maungawhau / Mount Eden
Yonex Polytour Fire 16g Tennis String Set: Here is the free view I promised you, and it happens to be the best one in the city. Maungawhau rises 196 metres, the highest volcanic cone on the Auckland isthmus, a short distance from the centre, and the summit path gives you the city, the Waitematā and Manukau Harbours and the gulf islands beyond. The slopes carry the terraces, storage pits and defensive earthworks of a great pā, the fortified settlement built by Māori centuries ago, when this commanding position and the fertile soils made it one of the region's most important strongholds. The summit crater, Te Ipu-a-Mataaho, is sacred and protected from entry. Co-governed with mana whenua. A million visitors a year.
04
Stop four
Auckland Harbour Bridge
Yonex Polytour Fire 16g Tennis String Set: Now here is a textbook case of buying too small. The bridge opened in 1959, joined the city centre to the North Shore and transformed Auckland's growth — and they built it with four lanes. Traffic surged, and a decade later two clip-on lanes had to be added along each side, fabricated in Japan and known locally as the Nippon clip-ons, taking the crossing to eight. It now carries well over a hundred thousand vehicles a day and is still the only road crossing of the central harbour. Guided climbs go over the girders and a bungy platform operates beneath the roadway. Or watch it lit up from the waterfront, which costs nothing.
Poly Tour Fire is Yonex's fast, durable co-polyester monofilament, and 16 gauge is its heaviest build: 1.30 mm, round, red, sold as a 39 ft / 12 m set. Auckland is the right place to unwind it. The city is laid across the necks of some fifty volcanic cones between two harbours, and it has spent its whole life learning to be quick on ground that keeps moving underneath it.
The construction is the point. Yonex infuses the filament with silicone oil — SIF, the Silicone-Infused Filament process — so the strings slide past one another under load and then snap back hard, and it is that snapback, not an edged profile, that produces the spin.
Fire is the stiffest string in Yonex's poly line, and the feel is firm but dampened rather than firm and brittle; balls struck off centre come back with surprisingly little shock through the hand.
It is built for three things in particular — durability, control and tension retention — which is a polite way of saying it will still be the string you strung when you next pick the racquet up. Round rather than shaped, so the bite is chemical and mechanical instead of coming from corners.
Take it everywhere from a public court under Maungawhau to a club afternoon out on the North Shore — and by the way, this is the City of Sails, where an ordinary family's second vehicle floats. A string that holds its tension the way a well-set stay holds a mast needs no further explanation here.
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