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.
The day began with a bit of wildlife-watching which, on Maria (Mar-I-a!) Island, just means stepping outside the door. I found a scattering of super-cute little pademelons in the garden, including one saluting the sun. Some of them had even cuter little joeys with them. Then came breakfast, which was a very impressive egg en cocotte, and yummy sourdough toast - well done, Sharna.
Today we were let off the leash, to explore by ourselves, with recommendations. The main one was Fossil Cliff so I ambled off in the sunshine back up to Skippy Ridge to admire the view again - and note, with only moderate bitterness, that Bishop and Clerk, and everywhere else, was clear as a bell today - and then carried on down towards the point.
The cliffs were indeed full of fossils, mostly shells, from the Jurassic period, so I gave them their due and then walked on along this very pleasant circuit. There was a good sprinkling of kangaroos on the airstrip, making a particularly Australian type of hazard to landing. They and the wombats keep the grass amazingly short - there's talk that there's a need to do some culling, for the greater good, which is a shame.
I admired a scattering of picturesque buildings from Bernacchi's era: he tried all sorts of things, from silk to wine to cement, and managed to live very comfortably without being a great success at any of them. It was surprising to find a headstone in the fenced graveyard inscribed in Maori: news to me, four Maori were transported here from New Zealand in 1846 for rebelling against the British colonists. Three of them were later pardoned and sent home, but Hohepa Te Umuroa had by then died of TB. His body was returned to Whanganui in 1989.
The four big cement silos are a real landmark and a very unexpected sight in such a remote place; but the Commissariat Store is a lovely heritage building, now an interesting visitor centre. There's a Coffee Palace that Diego built - now a museum - and convict housing, other houses, and the ranger's station as well as a campsite and bike hire place. It all felt very bustling, after our three days in the bush.
We all met up again by the ruins of the preacher's house, and Sharna popped open a bottle of champers to drink a toast with our lunch of Camembert, salad and freshly-made focaccia - again, well done, Sharna. We sat in the sun, eating and drinking, watching the day-trippers come and go in their boats, and then it was our turn. Sadly I missed the ritual Jumping Off the Jetty which, in the absence of any brave guests, Danny conducted all by himself, and met us, dripping, on the jetty when we came down to board our boat.
And then it was all downhill: the drive back to Hobart to the Maria Island Walk base to empty our backpacks into our suitcases, hear and give little speeches, receive photos and booklets, and then be delivered to our various hotels, on our own again.
It was a really lovely four days and I'm very glad I was invited along. The Maria Island Walk was something I'd had my eye on for ages, and it's very satisfying to be able to tick it off - especially since the whole thing is so well organised, so easy, so sustainable, so much fun. I thoroughly recommend it.
After a cold night snuggled in my sleeping bag, curled gratefully around a hot water bottle and waking occasionally to the sound of heavy rain on the canvas overhead, it was a sheer delight today to unzip the door to a clearing sky and the smell of waffle batter from the kitchen. Yum!
We set off along yet another of Maria (Mar-I-a!) Island's many lovely white sandy beaches and then climbed up to one of the quarries where the convicts had sweated hewing sandstone, back in the mid-1800s. To be honest, we were all distracted from the grim history here by a generous sprinkling of wombats. Even better, a bit further along, one came trundling onto a bridge we were crossing and walked right up to us (short-sighted, remember). It was only when it was about six inches from Sharna's boot that it realised something was amiss, and scuttled away.
Then, a bit further along, she stopped us again because what I would have taken for a stick, if I had even noticed it, was actually a tiger snake making its leisurely way across the road. Highly venomous, natch - but no stripes.
Next we walked along the top of a cliff, spotting Tasmanian devil pawprints on the track. They aren't native here, but were introduced in a kind of Ark scenario, because on the mainland their numbers have been dropping because of a horrible contagious facial tumour disease that eventually prevents them from eating.
They're striking little animals, endemic to Tasmania, and rarely seen not snarling - but we didn't see them at all, since they're nocturnal. Danny said they would probably have been hanging around the camp's barbecue last night if we wanted to try to spot them - but, rain, see above.
The highlight of this morning's walk were the Painted Cliffs. It was a bit of a scramble getting down to them, but well worth it: pleasing curves of coloured sandstone sculpted by the wind and sea, delicate, ephemeral and precious. Beautiful!
The camping part of our trip is over now, and we stopped up on Magistrate's Point overlooking the little settlement of Darlington, tucked into a big blue bay with a jetty and, most notably, assorted penal colony buildings. The island was used to house, and profit from the labour of, convicts for only about seven years, but the buildings are so well preserved that it has World Heritage status. After they went, a colourful Italian entrepreneur called Diego Bernacchi made Maria Island his little empire, and we're staying in his house tonight.
First, though, we had a mountain to climb. After lunch, we set off across more wombat-nibbled grassy slopes to stop at cliff-top Skippy Ridge and gaze up at the spiky 599m peak of Bishop and Clerk - named by some imaginative, or drunk, explorer who thought that's what these dolerite columns looked like. Yes, dolerite. There was an abundance of geological talk today, thanks mainly to the ex-geology lecturer who is one of the guests, but he was easily avoided, for the most part. Certainly, there was lots to look at and enjoy, besides the rocks.
Blue sea, green gum tree forest, currawongs and wombats, the distant mainland, a rocky island... and the peak. We started up it, climbing up and up at first through the woods, and then over a long scree slope of biggish rocks that the Hobart Walking Club had helpfully arranged into a zigzag path with rough steps. Up, up, up, back into the trees, and then, finally, we emerged onto a tumble of huge boulders below the hexagonal dolerite columns (yes, ok, some of that geo-chat rubbed off on me).
It was a bit of a challenging scramble up to the very summit, but Danny was really encouraging and helpful, and only one of us chickened out. From the top, the view was terrific, even if the cloud had thickened a bit.
The rocks were big and reassuringly flat, so I felt quite comfortable wandering around and peering down at the sheer drop on the other side - though Danny claimed I was giving him heart attacks.
Then we headed back down again and, just as with the Haunted Bay walk on Day One, the track just seemed to go on, and on, and on. I thought we would never get out of the trees. But we did, of course, and were rewarded by a close-up view of a big echidna (monotreme, like a platypus - egg-laying, milk-feeding mammal) burrowing its snout into the soil, and then lots of wombats, some with fat, furry joeys in their backwards-facing pouches (because of not filling them with soil when they're digging their burrows). There were also lots of cute pademelons (like a small wallaby) near the house plus Cape Barren geese, and native hens.
Back at the house - an 1888 wooden villa, elegantly furnished and, most importantly for us, equipped with beds and flushing toilets and hot showers with soap - we got comfortable by the fire in the living room, drinking excellent local wine, eating equally excellent local cheeses, and chatting before a lovely dinner of herb-crusted fish at a polished table under an antique lamp. The chat was relaxed, full of in-jokes (always a good sign) and the lemon dessert was sensational.
Then we moved back into the living room where Sharna sat by the fire and sang sweetly and unself-consciously as she strummed a guitar, while Danny contorted himself into a series of impressive stretches on the floor. No-one was in a rush to go off to bed, but when we did, it was with real appreciation of the simple home comforts we'd gone without for two whole nights.
