Travel Maven blog

No food or water, no dirt on your boots in New Zealand

The last time I traveled to Australia, in the mid-1980s, I remember being fumigated on the airplane – flight attendants running around the aisles and seats with bug balms, spraying hither and yon – before they let us out, wheezing onto the tarmac in Sydney.

After six weeks of a recent trip to Australia and neighboring New Zealand, I can tell you that the rampant spraying has stopped, but no one in this part of the world is any less afraid of the insects, germy mud or contaminated food that travelers might accidentally introduce to these island nations.

Cruising to mating penguins, a disappearing gun, a castle in New Zealand

Mating grounds for the Northern Royal Albatross are reason enough to visit New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula, but these grand birds are not the only attraction on a shore excursion from the cruise ship port of Dunedin.

Above a wide beach with rolling ocean surf, our tour group watched a single penguin (tiny, in the middle of the picture above) waddle to shore and cross the beach.

Then, as our group held its collective breaths, the penguin wavered in its decision about entering the mating grounds of the rare yellow eyed penguins. We could see a New Zealand fur seal hiding in the bush, hoping for a penguin lunch.

Cruising New Zealand, spotting the mating Northern Royal Albatross

Preparing to meet a colony of Northern Royal Albatrosses -- or are they albatri -- I remembered an image from high school when my English class was studying Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” A sailor wore a dead albatross around his neck as penance.

The poem is one of those prized pieces of literature that cause nothing but anguish to a high school kid looking for a correct answer among clashing symbols. Easier to understand is that the sailor was doing penance for killing the albatross, a symbol of good luck for seamen. You don’t want to destroy  anyone’s good luck charm, particularly when you are out in the elements, battling the forces of nature.

Besides, the albatross is a magnificent and awesome white bird, swooping and gliding with an amazing wing span of about nine feet.

Cruising farther south than I’ve ever been

Antarctica remains elusive for me as a travel destination, but I’m getting closer.

On my Celebrity Century cruise in Australia and New Zealand – from Sydney to Auckland with stops on the way – the ship rounded the bottom of New Zealand, East Southeast of Stewart Island.

Our southern-most point was at the geographic coordinates reading of 47.2 degrees latitude, 169 degrees longitude.

I know this because I asked the Century’s navigator, Georgios Bourboutzoglou. 

I told him that was the farthest south on Earth I had ever been.

“Me, too,” said Bourboutzoglou, who is from Athens, Greece.

Cruising New Zealand, slipping through Milford Sound

After two days and three nights at sea from Tasmania on the southern tip of Australia, Celebrity Century plunged into Milford Sound at sunrise.

You would not want to sleep-in on the day that your cruise ship slips through the three sounds on New Zealand’s southwest coast, not if you want to see Milford, anyway.

Our tour from the sea to the end of the Milford fjord was only two hours, so we were back out to sea in plenty of time for a full breakfast.

Cruising Australia, Prisoners of Mother England laugh like the devil in Tasmania

On the island of Tasmania, between the mainland of Australia and the ice of Antarctica, I did not encounter a single snarling Tasmanian Devil. But I did crash into the Tassie sense of humor.

Humor is a useful attribute for residents of an island best known for its feisty, carnivorous marsupial and a resident history as a repository for criminals in dire need of rehabilitation.

“We’re all POMEs here,” said a volunteer travel guide with dramatic flair as passengers streamed off a cruise ship, the Celebrity Century, and boarded shuttle buses for a day’s stay in Hobart, Tasmania’s primary city.

“That’s P-O-M-E,” he said. “Prisoners of Mother England. But you don’t need to worry. The pickpockets have been retrained. Now we fleece the tourists.”