Welcome to Auckland’s original ‘Municipal Destructor’. Everyone, like me, know it as Victoria Park Market – a super popular open air market through the 80's to 2000's – a great place to buy your crystals and tie-dies etc! I've always known that it was originally the city rubbish dump – when the city was waaaay smaller). There is more to the story, of course. It was originally created in reaction to a bubonic plague scare in Sydney. For sanitary reasons it was built to burn Auckland’s rubbish and waste while using the heat generated to provide electricity to power the city. Sounds pretty clever eh, and I guess we were plague free. However, we must have been breathing some seriously toxic smoke fumes! That 38 metre tall chimney must have helped a little but don't forget all the horse manure and night carts, they were definitely smellier times. The municipal destructor is now a gentrified place that's home to restaurants and businesses, like the superb Milenta restau...
Earlier this year a group of us entered the Woodhill Endura 360, a 6 hour endurance race in West Auckland. We raced as a team because none of us were anywhere near fit enough to race for 6 hours by ourselves, and surprisingly we won our classification!
The advantage of racing as a team was that I got to sketch in between laps. Dan, the instigator of our team entry — he entered us without running it past us first — wrote an excellent race report in his usual wry sense of humour. Visit www.inspiring-riding.co.nz for a copy.
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