It’s been a while so please accept our apologies for such a long delay in publishing a blog entry.  We won’t bore you with excuses so let’s pick up where we left off in Auckland at New Year with you all wondering what we were about to do next.

Regular readers will know we have changed our travelling style to include sampling more luxurious modes of travel, and just doing the things we’ve always wanted to do.  Heck, we’ve worked hard and done enough tea bag sharing to earn the right to splurge!  Add to that the fact the present government is itching to grab another slice of tax from us and we have enough incentive to use it or lose it.

We left Auckland on January 5^th aboard The Silver Muse, our latest cruise exploit.  This was to be a brief tour of NZ to see if we liked it and might want to revisit for a longer stay.  We’ve always said that as so many people rate it so highly, we really should go and give it a try.  What’s put us off is the distance but as we now know flying to Auckland isn’t that tortuous, but it is expensive!

We upped the budget considerably as Silversea Cruise Line is one of the best and certainly comes with great reviews.  The cabin was lovely but pretty much standard, after all there isn’t much you can do with 15m2, but we did have one very unique extra – a butler called Wayan!  Yup, Wayan from Bali had the rather fancy tailcoat and was there to satisfy our every whim.  Unfortunately for him, we struggled to find things for him to do, I mean what is one supposed to do with one’s butler?  Please feel free to add your comments on this one……….

The ship itself was quite small, only 600 passengers, everything included including an excursion in each port, and with excellent facilities.  This cruise was promising to be pretty damned good!

Our first port was the town of Napier for two nights.  The town was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1931.  It was rebuilt in the building design of the day, Art Deco.  It is so well preserved, and the streets are full of beautiful buildings and facades.  You can hire a tour around town in a 30’s Packard or just stroll around the town, along the seafront and the beautiful Botanic Garden.  There is also The Faraday Museum which is more about Tesla, the scientist, not the car, and memorabilia from way back.  We had a great visit, playing with pinball machines, sitting in an old dentist’s surgery, generally reliving our childhood.   So, Napier got a big thumbs up.

Back on board there was the usual dangers of cruising, great food, new friends and delightful wines and cocktails.  Generally, overnight you cruise to the next port and this time it was to Wellington.  Our day was to include a ride on a funicular railway in the centre of town and a trip to Zealandia.  It’s an Eco Park that was set up 1999 to try and recover and preserve the native wildlife which over hundreds of years has been destroyed due to over cultivation and fishing, importation of invasive species such as rats, cats and dogs and flora and fauna.  A huge fence over 5 miles long has been erected to keep out ‘the baddies’ and let the native species thrive and there is ongoing process of removing the invasive plants.  It covers over 500 acres it has attracted many native birds, lizards and other wildlife.  Zealandia also got a big thumbs up.

Next stop was Lyttleton which is the main port for Christchurch.  The town of Christchurch wasn’t very exciting.  It was devastated by a huge earthquake in 2011 and has been rebuilt with little or no reference to the buildings that were put up when the islands were first colonised.  For Christchurch read concrete.  There was a pleasant riverside walk that winded its way around the centre and an excellent botanical garden, but other than that there wasn’t much to interest us.

What we did enjoy was a cruise.  Yup, as if we haven’t been on a boat long enough, we took a tour around the vast harbour.  The Captain gave us a fascinating talk about the history and the geology of the harbour.   The trip took about 2hrs and included a visit to the wreck of the boat The Breeze.  There’s not much left of it but the Captain dramatized it’s history beautifully.  Whilst it clearly had a chequered history of mishaps and just plain bad luck the Captain did make it all very funny.   He also showed us the albatross sanctuary on the top of the cliff.  It was beautiful to watch them effortlessly gliding over us with wingspans of around 3m for an adult.  They are just mesmerising and it’s just amazing that they spend the first years of their long lives, up to 50 years, at sea without ever touching the ground.  Whilst Christchurch itself didn’t get a thumbs up the harbour cruise was outstanding. 

By now we were beginning to make friends at the quiz which took place most early evenings.  We became ‘quiz tarts’ by joining a few teams before settling with Sally and Ken.  We also met them at the dancing that took place every evening after the show in the theatre and somehow, not sure how, we talked about Ford Mustangs.  They have a few friends with classic Mustangs and Neil showed Sally our car.  We agreed to keep in touch and Sally put her phone number into Neil’s WhatsApp contacts.  He labelled her Mustang Sally, and the name stuck!  They were a lovely couple, Ken, from the east end of London, and Sally came to NZ as a small child from Taiwan.

Our next visit was to Dunedin where we had originally booked ourselves on another Eco-Park tour.  We decided to switch and what a result that was!  We started off with a quick tour of the town and the coach driver gave us a great commentary.  First to the quite stunning Dunedin Railway Station and the nearby Cadbury Fry’s Chocolate Company. 

We then moved on to the steepest street in the world, Baldwin Street.  We just had to walk or even run up to the top as we had limited time.  It was a challenge, but we rose to it! 

The highlight of the tour was to follow.  Starting with a scenic drive to Larnach Castle.  It’s a mock castle built in 1870 for the Larnach family.  William Larnach was an eminent entrepreneur and politician.  The history of the family was extremely sad but with lots of interesting scandal.  William had 200 labourers build his stately pile over three years for Eliza, his first wife and mother to his six children. With the untimely death of Eliza, two more marriages followed including the much younger ‘live in’ sister of Eliza.  She was named in his will which did not impress his children and she was rumoured to have had an affair with Willam’s eldest son. 

Due to changes in world economies his business empire began to crumble so the stress of this, the deaths, betrayals and infidelity left him a broken man.  He eventually committed suicide in Parliament Buildings.  Since his death, the building was used as a nun’s retreat, a billet for soldiers and a lunatic asylum.  At one point the ballroom was a sheep pen.  Eventually it was left empty and fell into total disrepair until a honeymoon couple came across it in 1967 and fell in love with it and bought it.  The Barker’s set about a restoration and now a widow, Margaret, is in her 80’s and is still involved with the property.  A tragic story with a happy ending.  Dunedin?  With the castle and the steepest road in the world it gets a big thumbs up.

It was time to say goodbye to New Zealand as we would be spending almost 2 days crossing the moody Tasman Sea to Australia. What did we think of NZ? From the little we saw we really liked the fact it was well cared for, nature was protected and respected and social equality pretty high. However, the weather wasn’t great for summer and it’s such a long, long way away. We don’t think we will be back but who knows?

After a somewhat bumpy couple of days the crossing turned out fine and we docked in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and awoke to blue skies and sunshine. We started with a trip to an animal rescue unit.  You name it, we saw it, emus, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, echidnas, too many birds to mention. The highlight for us was the Tasmanian devil. They are not whirling dervishes as depicted by Looney Tunes Taz, in fact they are just your average nocturnal animal the size of a small cat that crunches bones like we eat a chocolate digestive – ooooooo, so glad that wasn’t my finger!  It was a very friendly park, run on ticket sales, merchandise and donations.  Many of the animals are returned to the wild if it’s suitable and those that can’t live out their lives as members of the family. Long stayers have become very accustomed to the people and are allowed to wander free.

Richmond is a well-preserved town outside Hobart that boasts the oldest colonial gaol at over 200 years old.  There are many stories of criminals, male, female and children, that were transported to the colonies and used as extremely cheap labour to build and construct the colonies.  Many of the tales are tragic and you wonder just how cruel humans can be to send a starving 7-year-old girl halfway around the world for stealing bread.  What happened to her on the voyage and when she arrived, we can only imagine.  Of course, there are stories about the likes of Isaac “Ikey” Solomon (1785–1850) an English criminal who became an extremely successful receiver of stolen property, is widely regarded as the model for the character Fagin in Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. After being tried at the Old Bailey 1830, was sent to Richmond Gaol in 1832.  This is just a tiny part of his felonious life, look him up on the internet, his life story of deceit, convictions, escapes, crossing continents and becoming a constable himself is sometimes unbelievable……it’ll be 15 minutes well spent.

Day 2 in Hobart included a walking guided tour of the city.  Our guide just made the whole journey so much fun and he even provided us all with a view master that contained a reel of photographs taken around 100 years ago.  When we reached an iconic building in town, like a bank or newspaper, he told us some tales about the location and said look at the view master and now look at the building today.  It was such a simple idea, but it just brought the whole trip into focus. 

Of course, there were stories and intrigue and scandal highlighted by our final stop on the old quay outside what is now an Irish pub.  In the day, it was a bar run by a ‘madame’ and on the top floor, as you might expect from a thriving seaport, were rooms occupied by ‘cooperative ladies’ shall we say.  Not very far away is the Parliament Building and there are many rumours and stories that a tunnel was constructed to allow the Parliamentarians to visit ‘the ladies’ without being seen.  It also rumoured that the madam had bells in the bar attached on a string to each of the beds upstairs so that she could check on any ‘activity’ that was going on.  How true these stories are we don’t care – they are just very funny. 

Not far from this pub is Kelly Street with some beautifully preserved housing, some of which had plaques outside explaining who had lived there and what they did for a living. We also managed to get a private peek into the Old Theatre which is so much like our own Gateway Theatre but with a circle which we can only dream of.  Hobart gets a massive thumbs up.

After another day at sea we arrived in Eden.  By now we were beginning to understand that the Tasman Sea isn’t friendly even on a good day.  Our tour included a brief trip around the town, boring, before heading off to another wildlife sanctuary for more cuddly things including curious emus and Millie the blind wombat who was about to be placed on a much needed diet.   We make it out to be quite dull which isn’t fair as it was quite charming and very low key. 

The highlight of the trip was to visit the Killer Whale Museum which houses the skeleton of ‘Old Tom’ a killer whale that became friends with the whalers of Eden in the late 1800’s.  A unique relationship developed between killer whales (orcas) and human whalers where orcas would herd whales into the bay, and in return, whalers would share the prey’s lips and tongues with them, the only bits the orcas wanted, a practice known as the “Law of the Tongue”.   Fascinating fact – Orcas are not whales but are part of the dolphin family.

The whaling season was seasonal, and the orcas used to let the whalers know when the first whales of the season were arriving.  They even rescued whalers when their boat capsized during a whaling chase.  A truly unique and fascinating relationship which goes to show you just how smart some mammals can be.  Does Eden get a thumbs up?  Probably not but the Orca Museum was superb.

It was now that we fully understood how volatile the Tasman Sea can be.  The Captain announced that our 1 night in Eden and 2 nights in Sydney were to be reversed as the sea on the way to Sydney was turning very unfriendly.  Whilst the ship could manage the 5-6m waves he didn’t think that us passengers would enjoy the experience.  So, the day for sightseeing in Sydney was lost and another night spent in Eden. This was not fine as you will find out later as we had a special plan which relied on us reaching Sydney on schedule.

Everyone made the most of the last night on board it and the crew laid on extra events in the lounge area which fortunately had its own bar – yay – cocktails all round with Sally and Ken et al.

As we were now arriving on the morning of the final day and some passengers had early flights booked, The captain briefed us that he had secured an early entry into the harbour. Guests wanting to observe the sail into Sydney including passing the Opera House and passing under the Harbour Bridge needed to be up on deck around 6am. We woke in plenty of time to have a final room service breakfast only to realise the boat wasn’t moving and we had been ‘stacked’ outside waiting for a berth to become available and a pilot to see us in.  The arrival past the Opera House and under the Harbour Bridge was spectacular, which just wish we hadn’t got up a ‘silly-o’clock’ to see it.

What was the verdict on Silversea? It was really expensive but with everything included it made for a very enjoyable experience. We met some lovely and interesting people, the atmosphere on board was fantastic and the service outstanding. Food and drink were incredible with so much attention to detail. Would we use them again – for the right itinerary hell yes!

What’s next?  Well, more to come ‘in due course’.