Travel Maven blog

Walking Wellington, comfy cruise port for eating, gazing, shopping for short pants

When travel offered me a second shot at visiting Wellington, I wasn’t going to miss a morning at Te Papa, a lunch of green-lipped mussels (right), and a pair of three-quarter pants that are all the rage in New Zealand and Australia.

Checking out the gannets of New Zealand

I’m not much of a birder. I love to watch the Great Lake Erie birds swoop by my porch on the north coast of Ohio, especially the eagles that have returned to the marsh near Old Woman Creek. They dive for fish in the waters outside my window.

But I am a dunce when it comes to remembering names and markings, so I can’t tell you all the species that I’ve seen in Ohio or in my frequent wanderings around the world.

I won’t forget the gannets, though, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, where they nest on the edge of a cliff at Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand.

My trip to see the gannets was a shore excursion off the Celebrity Century at Napier, New Zealand, where thousands of people flock every February for the Art Deco Weekend, a celebration of Napier’s Art Deco heritage and history.

If you want to see more about the birds, take a look at Nesting with the wild gannets, my post at Checking In Checking Out, a new website with a theme of amazing places to travel, eat, and play golf.

Preparing a cruise ship for Aussies, Kiwis

Celebrity Century, a cruise ship that has spent most of its seagoing life in North America, is sailing around Australia and New Zealand this winter (summer in the Southern Hemisphere), getting a taste of what Aussies and Kiwis want to see and do on a cruise ship.

The Century is Celebrity’s first major investment into this part of the world, in preparation for one of Celebrity's newer and larger ships, Celebrity Solstice, which  arrives next fall.

That’s why, for instance, the Century has meat pies in the Lido buffet line and a jar of Vegemite next to the morning toast.

Fading chances for dinner with a cruise ship captain

At sea, a cruise ship captain sometimes invites a group of passengers to join him for dinner at his private table, which typically is large and well set, placed in the middle of the main dining room.

Those occasions have diminished with the increased size of new ships. Most captains of big ships now eat dinner in their own cabin or in staff dining rooms.

Captains and their tables past have flashed through my mind since mid-January, following the gruesome tales of the last evening in the life of Costa Concordia, when, during dinner, that captain apparently was not acting captainly.

The half a hundred ship's captains I have met during 30 years of cruising all exuded a calm confidence and command.

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.