We spent today pootling down the east coast of the South Island, at the grand speed of 8 knots, which even total landlubbers like me will immediately recognise is pretty slow. So it's been Christmas Day in Nowheresville, the coast barely visible in the cloud that made sea and sky uniformly grey - but the sea at least was calm (there were bigger waves in the swimming pool) and it was only mildly cool. Not bad weather for this latitude.
It was pretty lively inside - Santa arrived for pressies and selfies, to loud appreciation from the surprising number of families on board (children are not usually a Silversea thing) as well as the crew. People mainly just chilled during the day, hanging out in various lounges and in their cabins suites. The busiest place on board was, as usual, the Arts Café, which is deliberately fairly small with limited seating, so it's always in demand. It was just lovely to catch up there with server Miriam from Peru, who remembers and recognises us (and *cough* my dress) from the previous two cruises we've been on together - friendly, cheerful, TINY and cute.
It was a soporific sort of day, the ship just easing from side to side with minimal - and comforting-sounding - creaking. There was napping, there was delicious deep-fried camembert at the Grill on the pool deck under a heater, and then there was Team Trivia. We fronted up with hope in our hearts, and ended up placed in a not-very-prepossessing team of just four, with one younger Californian man and an older Scottish lady. But we did pretty well: 14/20. The winners got 19/20 but they were a team of eight, so if you calculate points per player, we were well in front... Questions included: What is DCL in numbers; who starred in Monster; and where is Barajas airport?
The evening brought the ritual Venetian Society gathering, where dinner-jacketed crew, from the captain down, met to schmooze with the many repeat guests on Silversea, and to celebrate those who (rich, greedy, habituated, unimaginative, addicted - or, of course! simply discerning) had accumulated big numbers of nights on board Silversea ships. The star tonight was 1131 - pretty impressive, but somewhat short of the 5000+ night record of someone on the last Silversea cruise we did. What really struck me were the several couples who had completed 78 cruises. That's pretty mind-blowing, I reckon. (We're up to 8 cruises ourselves, by the way, with a total of around 80 nights so we've some way to go before we reach the grand total of 100, which brings the coveted reward of free laundry. Though we will never qualify for that because - sorry, it's my job - we have only actually paid for 10 nights.)
We shared our dinner table with two other Kiwi couples tonight, and had a jolly time not having to explain anything we talked about - which included the green water in school pools 50-odd years ago; earthquakes; a hairdresser in common for a couple of us (in New Zealand we do two degrees of separation); and penguins. The others had traditional roast turkey but we were again sucked into ordering Maine lobster, and straight away regretted it, because NZ crayfish is infinitely superior.
The evening concluded with opera favourites, nicely performed by the show team of six. That was no match for Explorer Dream's cast of thousands - well, 50 - but it felt perfectly fine in the intimacy of the Venetian Lounge. And that was Christmas Day 2019. No complaints.
Car, ferry, car, road tunnel, plane, car, road tunnel, ship - the journey wasn't without incident, mainly because of the Chinese Uber driver at the end who didn't understand English, which you would have thought would be a fairly major daily handicap for him - but we got here finally. As a Mainlander, it's always good to cross Cook Strait and see the golden beaches along the top of the South Island, then the mountains with, currently, Indian snow (no? Apache here, Apache there (old joke, not mine)) and then the squiggly braids of the Kaiapoi and Waimakariri Rivers north of Christchurch.
The city itself looked lovely in its green, flowery, neat summer incarnation, but we swept straight through, under the Port Hills, end emerged in Lyttelton, somewhere I haven't spent any time for ages.
So, spurning the elegant comforts of the Silver Muse, I headed straight out and up to the Timeball Station for an overview - and my goodness, it did look gorgeous today. Turquoise sea, sun-baked rocky ruined crater walls all around, and little Lyttelton's pretty wooden villas clustered around the port with its big cranes.
The 2010/11 earthquakes did some serious damage here, and the Timeball Station itself fell down over two shakes. The tower was carefully dismantled and then fairly recently reconstructed exactly as it was, which is lovely to see since it's not only of historical importance - erected in1876, one of only two purpose-built in the world - but also part of the backdrop to town life. The ball drops at 1pm, but I didn't see that. I did though see the bronze statue of Skippy, the local dog that used to come running every day when she heard the ball being wound up, to bark as it dropped. Cute.
Back down in the town, there are plenty of buildings still showing damage, but mostly it's a gently buzzing little place well supplied with coffee shops and bars, and boutiques selling the sort of quirky, arty items that are fun to look at but which I can only imagine (other) people buying. The shop owners will be looking forward to increased custom now the port is back in action and they won't be losing all those cruise ships to Akaroa any more.
On board Silver Muse, we had a personal lifeboat drill session (we alone are joining the cruise five days after it began) which surprisingly delivered new information. Did you know you should always clip the top strap. under your chin, so the crew can use it as a handle to grab you and pull you on board the lifeboat? Essential knowledge right there.
Still clutching our lifejackets, and thereby disconcerting a number of fellow passengers guests, we plonked ourselves down to eavesdrop on the Team Trivia session that was under way. We got about 12/20 ourselves, were impressed by the questions - what day was 9/11? what's a group of polar bears called? what colour hair did Christopher Columbus have? - and left hoping to infiltrate one of the teams tomorrow, with more luck than we had with the total washout team we joined on Silver Wind in August.
The Christmas decorations on the ship are lovely - very tasteful, as you would imagine - though I have to say, Explorer Dream's gingerbread houses were superior. The crew are all wearing Santa hats, and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas with apparent genuine good will; and the ones who came trooping through the bar we were in pre-dinner loudly singing Jingle Bells all seemed to be having a good time.
We joined a group table for dinner, which was long rather than round so not that great for conversation, but we still enjoyed chatting with the American bridge professionals on board (for a month, playing twice a day only on at-sea days - sounds like a pretty good gig), a couple from near Sydney and a Kiwi vet and his wife. Conversation topics: the days of the 10/6 leg of lamb; the superiority of a schnoodle to purebred schnauzers and poodles; the post-Inca Trail e.coli infection of a cruise ship (not Silversea). And the special Christmas Eve dinner (lots of Europeans on board - this is their thing, and very happy we were to share it with them) was very good - seafood bisque and then roast goose with caramelised shallots (the goose suprisingly meaty, but nice) and cherries jubilee.
In all, a very pleasant and encouraging start to this Silversea cruise which began in Auckland (not for us) and will loop around the South Island before heading over to Tasmania, Melbourne and smoke-choked Sydney. Ten days of nothing but enjoyment ahead. Merry Christmas!
Am I as woke as the next bloke? Probably not, especially if the bloke is a younger person, and not actually a bloke - but I try. I do confess to some prejudices, though, and big cruise ships and Chinese tourists are two of them. So why did I agree to do a ship inspection yesterday of the 1,856-passenger Explorer Dream which is owned by a Hong Kong company? I really did wonder that myself, as I stood for ages in the poorly-organised security queue in Shed 10 with a large bunch of travel agents, waiting to board. I very nearly gave up on the whole thing, truly.
Turns out, it was a good thing I didn't, because I haven't had such an entertaining Sunday afternoon for ages. Getting eventually onto the ship, we were wafted through by dozens of neatly-uniformed smiling crew wishing us "Welcome on board!" and ended up in The Palace. This is the ship-within-a-ship that enables people with deeper pockets to get the sort of high-end, butlered, spacious experience that those of us accustomed to *cough* Silversea are happily familiar with. So we stood on deck at the stern, around the pool, or lounged a bit self-consciously on the four-poster sunbeds, and helped ourselves to an array of drinks. Being serenaded at that point by a solo saxophone (instrument of the devil, should only ever be allowed to play Baker Street, you've heard me on this before) I still had doubts - but things improved immeasurably very quickly.
We given an official welcome to the Explorer's maiden voyage round NZ that included, rather touchingly, a one-minute silence for the victims of Whakaari/White Island (slightly upstaging today's 2.11pm official silence, unfortunately) and then the mood was lifted by a really spectacular performance by some of the 50+ entertainers on board. Honestly, it was like something out of AGT - splendidly-costumed graceful dancing incorporating strength and contortions, drums and a mermaid who swam the length of the pool. It was brilliant!
So we were all in a good mood when the media contingent went for a Q&A session with the company president, head chef and PR person, and asked interested questions, and hardly quivered at all when the president trotted out for the fifth time his "Asian at heart, international in spirit" tagline. But then we toured the ship and, honestly, my prejudices fired up again. Yes, there was all the usual stuff - restaurants, spa, gym, casino, pool, lounges, huge theatre - plus kids' corner, games arcade. Trouble is (apart from the sobering comments from our guide that most of it was "chargeable"), it felt really crowded. And smoking is permitted. And the décor was a jumbled mix of styles, patterns and colours - eg the pool deck had a big video screen, a tangle of hydroslide, and Greek statues, so that all added to the crowded impression.
Then, we got to the first of two 'cabins' (not 'suites'!) that we were to be shown and boy, was it cramped. Tiny bathroom, very little storage space, and good-sized bed we all had to edge around. The sofa folded out into a bed for a further two people and no-one wanted to imagine what that would be like. We were taken then to an upper-end cabin, which was pretty classy, especially the spa bath with full-length window, and spacious too - but we were, spoiled babies that we are, still in shock from the other one, to be honest.
We'd been generously fed yummy samples at some of the restaurants we'd visited, and then were taken to the main restaurant for our promised "afternoon tea". Well! Kumera crisps, green-lipped mussel miso soup, hapuka, then wagyu beef and finally a sort of crème caramel, all delicious, and served with bottomless wines. And that wasn't all! We got another sample of the range of dancing on offer: Spanish, ballroom, fifties swing, ballet, acrobatic... again, brilliant, and very impressive - if just a teeny bit disappointing that we didn't get a taster of the Dream Boys act, which is like the Thunder from Downunder show I saw ages ago in Vegas (and which it seems I've never written about here. There was skin contact!)
So we all ended up in very good moods, especially the people staying on board for their week-long NZ cruise famil, who were feeling particularly smug. People like me who'd been invited but had turned it down were somewhat regretting it, to be honest. You'd think I'd never read Pride and Prejudice.
It's being a long day in Whakatane for lots of people, one of them the Firstborn reporting on today's recovery mission to Whakaari White Island to retrieve the bodies of those who were killed during Monday afternoon's eruption. She was up at 4am to witness the blessing of a tour boat taking family members and elders out to the island to remove the rahui before the SAS team moved in later. Amongst all the weary horror of the details being revealed of the - so far - 16 victims and their hideous deaths, and the long, painful struggle ahead for those still in danger in hospital (all of it making it seem a fatuous exaggeration to label the currently still-emerging British election results 'a disaster'), I worried that the Firstborn wasn't looking after herself, and wanted at least to recommend somewhere nice to eat in Whakatane.
So, not wanting to walk the three metres to the drawer containing my notebooks, I did a search on this blog and look what I found, from September 2012:
Tongariro hasn't spat the dummy again - yet; but White Island has been having hissy fits for months, and is particularly unwelcoming at the moment, with ash now featuring in the constant billowing clouds of sulphurous steam. Also, there are rafts of pumice stones floating downstream of the Kermadecs, so they've stirred into underwater activity too. These volcanoes are all on a line, along the edge of the same plate that our Volcanic Plateau sits on. Nothing to worry about, say the scientists airily.
You can go out to White Island - it takes about an hour and a half by launch from Whakatane - and do a tour, kitted up with hard hat and, yes, gas mask. They're even running the tours right now: "It's a great time to see White Island at a higher level of activity," the website claims cheerfully, but I don't know that I'd be keen. That place has killed people before now (not tourists - so far) and evidently you're told not to walk too close to the person in front, presumably so you don't break through the crust. I've been to Rotorua enough times to be aware of how thin the layer can be between us and the boiling water or mud - but to risk dropping into a volcano? Not so appealing, really.
I wrote that five years before I visited myself, and found it, literally, a spectacularly memorable experience that I was pleased to have done. Already, people are talking about what this lethal eruption will mean to the future economy of Whakatane which, for the last 30 years, has hinged on White Island tourism - it's a nice little town with a good beach, but there are plenty like that in the country. Should people have been allowed to go out there to walk in the volcano's crater? Should they ever be allowed to go there again, now we know how violently, and suddenly, it can erupt when the activity level was only at 2 out of 5? It's easy, of course, to be wise after the event.
A huge part of New Zealand's tourism industry is the thrilling stuff people can do here - throwing themselves off high places in umpteen different ways, hurtling down steep slopes ditto, skimming along a shallow river in a high-speed jet boat just inches away from rocky cliffs, category 6 white-water rafting: all that, and much, much more. The reason such potentially life-threatening activities are offered so routinely is because of ACC. The Accident Compensation Corporation, established in 1974, provides no-fault insurance compensation for everyone in the country, resident or tourist. So nobody can sue anyone for millions - if they're injured, they get what it's officially calculated they need to cover their care, expenses and a percentage of lost income, if relevant. (Hospitals, of course, are free.) We pay for it all through our taxes. Naturally, the system has its drawbacks, and it's probably significant that no other country has copied it, but it does mean that it's possible to let people do all sorts of dangerous things, commercially, and that's a great attraction.
Which isn't to say you can't put your life in danger in other countries too, even in the US. There, naturally, you need to sign waivers that cover every minute variation of things going wrong - before even a tame a ride on a horse, for example, there's a form to sign that includes a veritable thesaurus of terms covering every sort of movement the horse might make. But, despite all that, you can still do dangerous things, commercially, all over the world: hurtle down the *cough* Death Road in Bolivia, take drugs in the jungle in Ecuador, swim with whales (and whale sharks) in all sorts of places, stare down a wild lion from two metres' distance in Africa and paddle past hippos, climb Everest, jump into the sea in the Antarctic, teeter along cliffs in China, bounce in a boat remarkably close to a fire-hose of magma in Hawaii.
I've done some of those things, and they were exciting and fun, and I'm still here. So is the vast majority of everybody else who's done them. If they'd gone wrong, it could have been every bit as bad - possibly even worse, longer-lasting, more violent and painful - than the hopefully almost instant deaths (though not the injuries) of the victims of White Island. But it didn't. Instead, I had a good time, made vivid memories, and lots of people made honest livings from that.
I've seen the photos of the White Island victims, read their biographies, heard their families and friends speak about what they were like, and of course none of them deserved to die, or have the rest of their lives wrecked like that. It's a tragedy of the most extreme sort, made even worse by their having chosen to do that tour, for fun.
So, should they have been able to? Is there a line that should be drawn, allowing some things but not others? Who decides? Is that fair? Where would it all end? Big questions.
I've lived with volcanoes most of my life. I could see the side of an old crater from the kitchen window of the house I grew up in. I can see the double peak of one from my chair right now, in the haze across the Gulf. They're common throughout New Zealand, just part of the scenery, which they've helped to create. Most of them are extinct, a few are dormant, a couple active. Most active of all is Whakaari White Island, so it wasn't surprising that it erupted yesterday. It was certainly shocking, though, because it happened while several parties of tourists were visiting it from Whakatane.
So far we know that five people have died, and 31 are scattered around various hospitals in the country, getting specialist treatment for serious burns (it was a hydrothermal eruption, ie mainly super-heated steam). They are Kiwis and tourists from a number of countries, especially Australia. Some were passengers on the giant Ovation of the Seas cruise ship that had called in at Tauranga. Eight are still missing, on the island and so far unrecoverable because it's too dangerous to land there, but they are presumed dead. Cameras recorded them near the crater lake a minute before the eruption so it's very unlikely that they were able to escape to the only shelter on the island, a shipping container that's about a 10-minute walk away from there, near the old sulphur factory and the jetty.
Helicopters and a tour boat swooped in to help rescue people straight away, but haven't been allowed back. It's a very unpredictable volcano. The GeoNet activity level for it was 2 yesterday (maximum is 5). When I went there in 2017 with Frontier Helicopters (now called Kahu and active in the rescue effort) it was 1, but still awesomely active, and so immensely impressive and spectacular that I was especially pleased to have got there. As usual, my pedestrian lack of imagination and total trust in my guide meant that I never actually considered that anything bad might happen, even though he told us about the eruption in the middle of the night in 1914 that killed ten factory workers in their beds.
As I remember, we had to sign the usual Kiwi-lite waiver before boarding the chopper - nothing like the closely-typed multi-page document they give you in the US - and were given hard (plastic) helmets and gas masks (filter only) to use when clouds of sulphur dioxide blew our way. They did that quite frequently as we slowly wandered around, marvelling at the steam and fumeroles, the yellow and red staining of the rocks, the sinister cloudy turquoise of the crater lake, and the artistically-pleasing wreck of the factory. We were there for about an hour, looking and listening, and then boarded our chopper again to fly away, all of us happy to have visited such a dramatic and remarkable place. We should have felt lucky, too. Can you imagine those poor people's terror?
The problem with being given free travel - yes, ok, your eyeroll has been noted - is that often it's because the operator finds they have a vacancy on an upcoming trip/tour/cruise/whatever that they feel they might as well fill, often at quite or even very short notice, with a travel writer. That does incur moderate expense to themselves, but the payback is literally that - publicity that will result in more sales to the general public.
Sidenote here: Travel writers sometimes feel/are made to feel inferior to regular fee-paying guests, and subsequently are given inferior accommodation, even made to sit at the back of the bus, that sort of thing. This is wrong. Looking at it in purely financial terms, the travel writer is actually worth many times more in income than that punter, because - if the experience is good and results in enthusiasm - the stories written about it will encourage lots more people to consider that tour/cruise/etc, and front up to hand over their hard-earned. So it's in the operator's interest to make sure that the writer is treated exactly the same as everyone else, and gets an authentic and genuine experience.
Anyway, the problem with trips like the one I've just been on to Maria Island in Tasmania is that clearly it was offered to me because only two couples had booked places, and the tour ideally caters for 10 guests. What's wrong with that, you ask? Don't you get more individual attention, a room to yourself instead of sharing, more food? Yes to all of that, of course.
The thing is, though, that being part of such a small group means that if there is someone there whose company you would not normally seek out, they are impossible to avoid. This has happened to me several times, and it happened again on Maria Island. (We will, for the purposes of this post, breeze straight past the 'it's not you, it's me' alternative explanation.)
On this walk were two Canadians who - well, there's no need to go any further, is there? They were Canadians, so they were mild-mannered and polite and cheerful, and I liked them. There were also, however, two Brits. Now, I have close connections to very many Brits, I lived in the UK for 17 years, I know Brits, in all their many incarnations, and I've liked most of them. These two, though? Yeah, nah.
He was a geology bore who knew he was a geology bore, and yet made no effort not to be boring about geology. I tell you, he went on, and on, AND ON about rocks and minerals and escarpments and batholiths and dolerite and granite and sandstone and many other words I can't remember because my brain gave up in disgust. He held us up while he lectured the long-suffering guide who made a valiant show of interest, he monopolised the conversation, and he bored me STIFF!
He had been a university lecturer on the subject, clearly going against the general tendency of teachers to want to enthuse their students about their subject. Since then he had worked in the oil business and was a defensive apologist for the industry when he wasn't being boring about rocks, so he was not likely to find me warming to him anyway.
And then there was his wife. She decided early on that she would be the life of the party, and bubbled continuously, and self-consciously, for the entire four days. She made Dad jokes that she laughed at herself, loud and bubbly, and repeated several times. She told us all about her life and career, her children, their children, their house in Cornwall, their yacht, their travels, the big names they knew. She went on, and on, AND ON and - without showing more than the most superficial interest in us - ostentatiously drew the Canadians and me into her conversations, being deliberately controversial, and then bubbling with loud laughter at the awkward silences that led to. She set my teeth on edge.
If there had been more people in the group, it wouldn't have been so bad, but there was no escape at all: they were full-on and undiluted, and it will be some time before my memories of beautiful and interesting and wildlife-rich Maria Island will lose that irritating soundtrack of low, boring drone and high, shrieking bubble.
No such thing as free travel, eh?
So the alarm goes off at 4am, and half an hour later you're standing under a streetlight while half a block away there's a police car with its lights flashing and a bunch of dark figures doing something unidentifiable while you frown and hope your bus will turn up soon. There are better ways to start a day, really.
It's bad enough, having to leave Tasmania after such a short visit. Less than a week - but oh, it was good! The Maria Island Walk was wonderfully done: really well organised in an unobtrusive way; with excellent, knowledgeable, laid-back, friendly and funny guides; comfortable accommodation, good food, and bottomless wine; stunningly glamorous scenery; and adorable wildlife (not including the tiger snake).
I would have liked longer in just Hobart, which is a cute little city with a lovely harbour, full of historic houses, museums, restaurants and gardens. They're already gearing up for the end of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, which feels as though it's going to be almost as big as Christmas. I bet it's fun.
But I"m on my way home: a 50 minute flight Hobart to Melbourne, 5-hour wait there, and then another three hours home plus a two-hour time change forwards, so it's going to be about 6pm by the time we land. Then bus, then ferry, then car, and maybe I'll be home by 9pm? Long day.
