Even the rain up here has a different feel. It's somehow wetter. Moisture hangs in the air like microscopic fragments of a pluvial cluster bomb.
It's still too cool to be humid, but the damp acts like a sponge soaking up exotic scents from suburban gardens.
Between the cabbage trees, you can see occasional banana palms grow, and bougainvillea vies with wisteria as the stole of choice around the veranda arches of wooden villas; some are weather-beaten and faded, others are brightly-coloured and strive for visibility amid the loud vegetation - here and there a hibiscus bush, orchids carelessly blooming from a discarded and fractured terracotta pot, jasmine or orange blossom in a concert of floral abandonment atop a subdued indigenous hedgerow.
And after the precipitation, their fragrance hovers like essence from the dropped handkerchief of a perfumed mistress.
I'm in Auckland at the generous behest of the Auckland Theatre Company.
A troupe of professional actors is work-shopping my play The Truth Game in a programme called The Next Stage.
Every year the theatre selects three new New Zealand works and gives them a two-week rehearsal, culminating in a semi-staged production over two or three nights.
It's an instructive and humbling exercise - watching this cast of highly-trained thespians arrive as if from their last outing as Nasa test-pilots only to find themselves in charge of a lumbering World War 2 bomber; and seeing them strip the clumsy machine back to its parts and reassemble it, all the while asking piercing questions, like, "Why would my character do this?", or "How does this fit into the arc of the drama?"; to which you scramble to recall what you had in mind at the time - probably in the early hours of a morning while in the trance-like state, possessed of its own peculiar logic, that fiction demands - and while a timid inner voice urges immediate flight: "How should I know? I only wrote the damned thing".
One of the other new plays in the season is called Le Sud, by Dave Armstrong, a playwright of some renown and whose work - The Tutor, Niu Sila, Where We Once Belonged - deserves exposure in the south.
Le Sud premieres at the Wanaka Festival of Colours next year. It arises from the premise that the French arrived in Akaroa before the British and colonised the South Island.
Le Sud is now wealthy on the back of subsidised agriculture and the hydroelectricity it sells to the British North Island, which is fighting a civil war against Tuhoe, is overpopulated, and is broke.
A delegation arrives from the north to seek "aid" from the south.
It's a farce, of course, but being here does reinforce how the distance between us can warp relative perceptions, each for the other, of Dunedin and Auckland.
In Dunedin, we hear about the latest mugging or stabbing in Manurewa and allow ourselves to imagine Auckland is Gomorrah, that it is as savage and dangerous as Johannesburg or down-town Baghdad.
Or that it is unattractively populated with loud, flashy "Jafas".
On Sunday, a day off from rehearsals, I wandered with a friend across the dormant volcanoes of Devonport, looking back over the city to the south, east and north out over the Hauraki Gulf; then along Cheltenham and Narrow Neck beaches, and through the suburban streets.
Contrary to everything we hear, this is a beautiful city.
I am staying with friends in Kingsland. Each morning I walk 10 minutes to the station and take a 15-minute train ride into the Britomart Centre.
The carriages are clean, the ticket collectors polite and the fellow-travellers helpful.
I arrive in time to pick up a coffee - the best coffee I've had in a long time - from a local cafe, and in the lunch break treat myself to sushi, or a cheap Thai stir-fry from one of the ubiquitous Asian foodcourts - a stir-fry that tastes exactly like one you'd get from a roadside stall in Bangkok.
A friend from Christchurch who has spent the past five years in Auckland told me that the notion of "a South Pacific nation" always struck an odd note - surrounded as she was by architectural, cultural and botanical evidence to the contrary.
But immersed in this, by far our biggest city, it makes perfect sense.
I love Dunedin, its unassuming if somewhat faded grandeur and its many individual charms, but it is salutary to come to Auckland and be reminded this country we live in does not end at Cook Strait.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
