Arrival in New Zealand

We greet 2007 with a flight to New Zealand on luxurious middle-eastern Emirites Airlines. Our viewing choices on board include Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on global warming – finally we can see it! We highly recommend it to everyone.

In Auckland, the City of Sails, we investigate our traveling options. It’s summertime here, kids are out of school until early February, and rental campervans are scarce and sport holiday rates. A small rental car and modest lodgings will be much less expensive. In Auckland we also get our first taste of a backpacker hostel. The lowest floor is communal space for cooking, eating, lounging, and internet use. These places are great for meeting people from all over the world.

We ask where to buy a cooler. The desk clerk looks blank for a moment, then confuses us by talking about chili beans. At the designated store the mystery is solved by the written word. Ahh. We buy our own chilly bin. At the grocery store we load up a trundler with supplies and head out, no worries.

Driving on the left whilst steering from the right is initially as awkward than you might think, like trying to write with the wrong hand. In fact, on opening a door, we are often surprised to find or not find the steering wheel on that side. To make a left turn, we usually turn on the windshield wipers.

We seldom can say where we’ve just been or where we’re going. Almost all the town and bay names are Maori. The Maori are Polynesian people, and their language bears a strong resemblance to Hawaiian. They use more than their share of vowels (which may account for why the Slavs have such a shortage). Consider: “wai” means water, so there’s Waimamaku, Waipoua, Waitakere, Waipapakauri, Waitiki, Waiomio, and waimanymore. That’s not to be confused with the plethora of “wha-“ (pronounced “fa-“) locales such as Whananaki, Whangaroa, Whangaruru, or Whatipu. Then there’s Karekare, Kerikeri, and Karikari. And that’s just for starters. We try never to ask for directions.

This is a gorgeous land of steep mountains, blue bays, immense kauri trees (only California’s sequoias are larger), sheep dotting hillsides and valleys, and laid-back, humorous people. We’re doing our share of tramping the cliffs, caves, and forests. Every day is a new adventure in places we can’t pronounce.

Cheerio for now!

We find the mythical southern Continent!

The distance a harbor pilot must travel onboard a ship depends on the difficulty of navigating the coastal waters. Approaching Brisbane, we inherit a very friendly pilot hours out because of the thrillingly complicated network of reefs and atolls. We soon find out that Aussie generosity is not a myth. Just before leaving the ship at noon, Graham the pilot tells us that he will return at 4 pm to start us on our way into the city. Sure enough he drives us from the shipyard to an ATM and then the railway station, buys(!) our tickets, and sends us off with advice for destinations in Brisbane.


Christmas celebrations are in full swing downtown, culminating in a spectacular fireworks show on the river. Even more stunning, at dusk as we wait for our dinner at an open-air restaurant, we look up to see a tremendous flock of large birds flying overhead. As we watch we realize that those birds are in reality hundreds of huge bats!

By the next morning we’re out at sea again, heading for Sydney. On Christmas Eve there’s quite a party with the officers and crew. A couple of jolly Japanese technicians who had boarded in Brisbane to fix an electronic malfunction sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in Japanese!

We arrive in Sydney on Christmas Day. The entire dock is closed. Art and I leave to find a hotel for Christmas week – a tall order. We luck out, and the following day we bid a very nostalgic farewell to Captain and crew.


We spend a week exploring the city: the famous Sydney Opera House, the historic Harbour Bridge, the Royal Botanic Gardens, museums, docks, ferries, etc. On New Year's Eve we find ourselves in the biggest crush of people you can imagine for the wild fireworks show at midnight.


Other tidbits that impress us:

1. A substantial number of tourists having been knocked off in this
drive-on-the-left nation, all intersections provide a helpful hint on which way to look when crossing.

2. We are thrilled to find a large grocery store underground at the train station.

3. Most toilets offer a choice of flushes (half or full). What a concept! Why aren’t these standard in the US? 4. There are always buskers (street performers) on Circular Quay (Surprise– I’ve lost those photos).

5. Public restrooms are everywhere (again, why not in the US?) Also, in preparation for New Year’s Eve, hundreds of vault toilets are set up, but playing a practical joke on the desperate, they’re padlocked shut till the big day!

Pacific Islands

Whoa, already we’re destroying any reputation to which we may possibly aspire. Time and adventure march on, and we have left you in terrific suspense.


In mid-December our ship docks in the French islands of Tahiti and then New Caledonia. Volcanic in origin, these islands jut abruptly upwards at startling angles and in improbable shapes and spires, all swaddled in lush, verdant green. And it’s hot! We cover the islands as much as we can by foot and tiny rental car powered by chipmunks. Two young men are hitchhiking, so we pick them up and fold them into the back seat. When we greet them in English they look panic-stricken but quickly recover. They speak a little English, et nous parlons un peu de Francais, so we limp along fine.

We walk and sweat till we’re ready to drop and then return to the ship to catch some of the unloading/loading show. In Tahiti our ship is taking on 490 containers: 10 full and 480 empty! Similar in New Cal. Not too much is produced here. Pairs of dockworkers in bright yellow vests risk their lives clambering around, guiding the multi-storied containers into position by pushing, pulling, and gesturing to the crane operators. It’s a less streamlined process than at our other stops; they need two full days to unload and load. It’s well past dark by the time they finish and we chug away.

A few days later we cross the International Date Line, leaping effortlessly from Sunday straight to Tuesday. Now everything happens to us on a day you haven’t had yet!