Best Auckland · Things to Do · Tours
Unique Things to Do in Auckland for Adults
Quick Guide — The Tours
The best things we did in Auckland this winter all involved being taken somewhere we weren’t allowed to go alone. Three tours, all with an age restriction — stay with me, it’s not that kind of adults only.
What they have in common is access: a set time, a booking, and someone taking you past a door you can’t open yourself. It’s also why all three come with conditions — a locker for your phone, an age limit, a forecast that can cancel you the morning of.
The honest reason we did all three is that it’s a chance to see Auckland in a way we hadn’t before. Not the front of these places — the inner workings. What’s under the floor, what’s above the stage, what’s inside the dome.
And two of them have a deadline. The Secret Museum Tour and the Civic close within a week of each other, at the end of September and the start of October.
Under the museum
You leave your phone in a locker before you start. There’s a security guard with you the whole way, the group is capped at around a dozen, and you’re told — more than once — not to touch anything. Not the cases, not the crates, not the walls. No leaning.
That sounds like a list of restrictions, and it is, but it’s also the point. This isn’t a tour of the collection. It’s a tour of how the collection is kept, and you can’t do that in a room full of people with cameras.
You go through the back passages first, then into a cargo lift, and down. There’s a sticky mat at the threshold — you walk across it and it lifts any pests off your shoes before you go further. Mites and the like, the things that get into textiles and quietly destroy them. Nobody makes a speech about it. It just tells you, in one step, how seriously this is taken.
Photography is not allowed on the Secret Museum tour, so this one is theirs. Image supplied by Auckland Museum.
What’s down there isn’t a display. When we went, there were large Māori carvings that had recently come in, sitting in storage rather than on show, and we heard a little about how pieces like that arrive and how they’re worked through by the curators. Elsewhere, people were at benches packing smaller objects in foam — the ordinary daily work of keeping things intact.
The part that stayed with me: most of what’s held there will never be seen by anyone. It’s still catalogued, still conserved, and photographed extensively so there’s a digital record of it. Someone overseas researching a particular object, or a subject, can request the images rather than anyone having to pull the thing out. We saw the cameras, but not the process running.
There’s more held off-site with third-party storage too, so what’s under the building isn’t even the whole of it.
Who it isn’t for: anyone who wants photographs, anyone who wants to see treasures, and anyone who’d rather sit down — you’re on your feet the whole time and the space isn’t built for visitors.
The Zeiss at Stardome
The dome is timber, from the sixties, restored — and it moves. That sound, the whole structure shifting around you as the telescope is repositioned, is one of the best things about the night. I wasn’t expecting the building itself to be the memorable part.
The copper on the outside was stolen during Covid and had to be replaced. Worth knowing while you’re standing under it.
Our guide had an astrophysics degree and obviously loved the subject, which made the difference — she’d put a laser on a star, talk about it, and then the telescope would be lined up on it. Listening to her would have been worth the ticket even without the eyepiece.
Honest bit: I found it hard to see much through the telescope myself. I wear glasses and it came out fuzzy. It didn’t spoil the night, but if you’re going purely for the view through the lens, know it’s not guaranteed to work for everyone.
It’s the largest public telescope in the country, and Cornwall Park is the most central place in Auckland you can use one. Stardome and the park have a friendly working arrangement: the park turns its lights off at night to help reduce light pollution.
On a clear night you’d expect four or five objects. Star clusters, and Venus for example.
While you’re waiting for the tour to start there are displays to look through, which is a better wait than most.
Who it isn’t for: under-14s, anyone claustrophobic, and anyone too polite to speak up. The space is small, you stand the whole time, and you’ll need to shuffle around to get a look — if you won’t say “I can’t see”, you won’t see.
Access: there are steps up to the platform and the dome isn’t wheelchair accessible. Stardome will help arrange an alternative if you contact them.
If you’re going in winter: dress properly. The dome opens to the sky and it’s cold. Expect the possibility of a reschedule — cloud alone is enough, and they’ll contact you to move you rather than cancel outright.
Booking, and this is the useful bit. It runs all year, Friday to Sunday nights only. In winter there are two sessions, 7.30pm and 9pm. Once daylight saving starts the 7.30 goes — it isn’t dark enough by then — so summer is the 9pm alone, and that makes it harder to get into.
Sessions usually book out about a month ahead. But in winter they release dates only within the month itself, because they have to hold capacity back for the cancellations and reschedules that cloud forces. So a month showing nothing is not a month that’s sold out. Keep an eye on it.
The Civic
Most Aucklanders have been inside The Civic. Far fewer have been inside it empty — and that’s the whole of it. An hour in one of the most beautiful rooms in the country with the lights up, the seats empty, and someone who loves the building telling you why it looks the way it does.
You go up through the grand foyer, along the colonnade, into the back-of-house corridors, out at the top of the house with the projection room windows above you, and then down through the empty seating. Then the green rooms, and then out onto the stage — looking at an empty house from where the performers stand, which is stranger and more moving than you’d expect.
It finishes with the curtain coming down and the ceiling turned on. A group of adults who’d walked in an hour earlier being polite about a building were, by that point, ooh-ing and aah-ing.
Be honest with yourself about the stairs — around 300 steps, with railings and a few rests but no real sitting until near the end. It’s the most physically demanding of the three.
Still on our list
There’s more of this in Auckland than we’ve got to yet. Two we’re planning: the Eden Park stadium tour, and Pitchblack Playback at Capitol Cinema — an album played in full, in the dark, with an eye mask, on a cinema sound system. $20 a seat. If you’ve done either, tell us whether they’re worth it.
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