We started with a walking tour of the city. Our guide was entertaining, but didn’t have a lot to say that we haven’t already heard. The local government commissioned an artist to create a statue of Maori as strong and ready for battle. The artist decided it would be more appropriate to make the statue of a noble Maori looking out to the Pacific Ocean, contemplating the great achievement of navigating to New Zealand. Those artists are always changing things around. Anyway, the powers must have decided the statue was good enough. It’s in the harbor area.

We also saw this street art on the side of a building. Our tour guide kept describing the art using words such as inclusiveness. I finally figured out he meant LGBTQ+.

Here is a pic of the University of Auckland clock tower. This is a stand-in for the picture I should have taken but didn’t. Danita is facing another clock built into the ground in a garden. The numbers 3, 6, 9, and 12 are made from flowers. A circle of flowers defines the clock face. In the center of the face is a pipe buried in the ground holding a clockworks. What’s missing from the garden clock are the hour and minute hands. Our guide talked about a game university students like to play that involves placing a large number of beers on the clock “face” and guys (it’s always guys that do this silly stuff) trying to drink beer fast enough to consume it before the clock knocks a beer over. Somehow the game seemed to include running away from security officers. As you have noticed, I didn’t get the full gist of the game. But I did notice that our guide also mentioned that he graduated from Auckland U, and he didn’t discuss how well he did in the clock beer game.

The last pic is from the Maritime Museum. This is a modern model of the double-hulled boats the Maori used to navigate the Pacific. The materials are modern (fiber glass for the canoes, for example) but the lines and dimensions are true to the Maori. I get the idea. If you use a boat for educational sails for school kids, you have to meet modern safety standards. But I thought the solar panels were a bit much.

We stay overnight in Auckland. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

After we docked in Tauraga, we visited the village of Tewhakarewarewatangaoteopetauaawahiao (Whaka for short). This is an actual village with about 70 Maori. We stopped for a photo at the village welcome center. We weren’t permitted indoors because it is sacred.

This village is on thermal steam vents, which are in active volcanic areas. Not long ago they had to evacuate the village due to a volcanic eruption. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and no damage was done.

Their entertainment troupe performed dances and songs for us. So far as I can tell, these were authentic. The man in the center is supposed to have his tongue out and his eyes bulged. It creates a fearsome image and helps the warrior prepare for war.

There were 39 passengers in our tour. Our bus driver was the worst ever. He told us he had to use a backup bus because this bus was in an accident yesterday — somebody drove into the bus. He twice had to stop short because he didn’t yield right of way to traffic entering a round about. He never told us when the bus was going to return. One of the passengers had to go back and ask. When it was time to go back to the ship, he counted the passengers and started to leave a couple of minutes early. If we hadn’t called out, he would have left three people behind. One of the passengers asked if he counted people. He said “I counted 46 before those three showed up.” On the way back to the boat, he drove over a large rock that was in the center of a round about. His reaction was to laugh about it. I’m convinced he was responsible for the accident yesterday. I don’t think he will be driving tour buses for long.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

If there are no pictures, did anything happen? We took a inflatable boat river ride today. I always try to travel light, but this time I went “overboard”. My phone, my multi tool, my eye glasses, and even my hearing aids stayed behind in the cabin. One man took a huge bag — way too big qualify as an airplane carry-on. I can’t imagine what he thought he needed. It was a 5 hour tour, 90 minutes of which were in the water, in a class 2 section of the river. Enough to have a little fun, not enough to cause serious anxiety. The weather was perfect — sunny and warm. Nobody fell overboard. Everybody had a great time. The countryside was absolutely beautiful. Danita and I got up early this morning and earned ourselves a bonus. We had a stunningly beautiful and dramatic sunrise. But don’t tell Holland America. I’m sure they will charge us if they find out. ;-)

A1931 earthquake made major changes to Napier. Ground was moved up 5 feet or so. The water line was pushed back a couple of blocks. Swampy areas became dry land and underwater areas became swampy. The beautiful deep sea port became a ho-hum port. The white sand beaches became rock strewn water with dangerous tides. Buildings made with bricks collapsed. Buildings made of wood generally survived the quake but didn’t necessarily survive the fire. The silver lining is that Napier rebuilt their commercial district over the next couple of years. Today, they bill themselves as the Art Deco capitol of the world. They also had a major cyclone about two years ago. We saw plenty of abandoned houses in the rural area. The storm moved one house several hundred yards down the hill. It seems every port has at least one weather disaster story. Here’s hoping the good weather holds for another week.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We started out with a cable car ride. Wellington starts at the ocean and climbs the hill. It’s a particularly steep and long hill. It’s only one hill, but people get tired of walking it. So they installed a cable car, not unlike the cable cars in San Francisco. Where the Wellington cars differ is the length of the line. While substantial, it is much less than the length of a line in SF. Eventually, they decided to modernize it. They installed a fully automatic system with a amazing cable setup, and put an operator in the car just in case. You can see one of the original cars on the left, and the new cars approaching the top of the hill on the right. You can see the new cable pulleys. They are quite impressive.

Our main activity was Te Papa, the national museum. I learned some amazing things. For example, Cook successfully mapped New Zealand. He only made one large mistake. He thought NZ was one island. He missed a rather substantial gap between the north and south islands. Since he knew nothing of the gap, people decided to name it Cook’s Strait. Who can explain these things?

The more substantial interesting subject was the aboriginal people, called the Maori. NZ has an official policy of being a dual-culture country. The main reason for this is a man (I don’t remember his name) who came from England to help improve law and order in the early days of European whaling. The Maori asked him for help. He advised them to write a declaration of independence. That transformed the many Maori tribes into one nation with the right to negotiate with the English government. They negotiated The Treaty of Waitangi. Mostly, the treaty demonstrates that the world is not yet perfect. The large yellow and clear banner hanging from the ceiling in the left hand picture is the remains of the original. Obviously, whoever was responsible for preserving the treaty did not consider it an important document. The museum also had three passages extracted in both English and Maori to illustrate why the two treaties couldn’t be the same. For example, the Mauri culture has no concept of land ownership, so the section on land could not describe it in Mauri. You can see the English version of the extractions on the right. Obviously, there is some very active “discussion” of what specific actions should be taken to fulfill the treaty.

We also saw a model of a Maori boat of the type they would use when sailing between islands. According to our guide, Cook’s boat had a top speed of 5 knots. The Maori boat could do 15. We saw a full size example of a smaller Maori boat (no picture of this one) that had white Albatross feathers tied along both sides of the canoe. This told the navigator the speed and direction of the wind.

We saw a Maori “food pantry” — a house on stilts with elaborate carvings. You can see it below. The round white disks are eyes. The more eyes in the carving, the better the protection.

The museum has a Welcome Place that was dedicated to a powerful chief. We weren’t able to photograph it because it is sacred and still being used by the Maori. (They come in the museum and gather inside the Welcome Place.) Compare the carving on the food pantry to a modern Welcome Place called Te Hono Hawaiki (which we could photograph). The structure is made of wood. They made some amazing shapes. It’s obvious the Mauri are not a backwards looking people. They are perfectly willing to adapt themselves to modern technology when they find it appropriate.

That’s enough for today. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are 1100 guests on the ship. Because this is the low season, there are fewer than 800 residents in Akaroa. This is a vacation town without a lot to see or do during the fall. Danita and I got an excursion to go to Christchurch. It was a half hour ride in the tender and another hour and a half on the bus. The bus ride was mostly over narrow mountain roads. But what beautiful countryside. I took this pic standing about 2 inches away from a fence that was both electrified and had barbed wire. It wouldn’t be a good place to loose your footing.

Along the ride, Danita noticed these boat sheds that reminded us of Jean and Leo’s boat shanty on Lake Erie.

Christchurch was devastated by major earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. The had a lot of old historic buildings built with stone or brick. Virtually all of them were destroyed. They have done an incredible job of rebuilding. One of their problems is that the downtown area was closed, with 24 hour military patrols, while buildings were being demolished. Businesses couldn’t wait, and built new facilities outside of town. Now that the damage is mostly repaired, the town is open but businesses are largely happy staying outside the downtown area. Most of the new construction is good, but a few organizations built temporary structures that are still being used. The most famous of these is the cardboard church. You can see round rafters holding the roof up. These rafters are made out of cardboard tubes with cement poured in the center.

We saw an excellent botanical garden, and had a wonderful lunch / wine tasting. The tender ride back to the ship splashed around quite a bit. We saw the pilot ship. It was running beside us at a pretty good speed. They were bouncing around on a roller coaster that never ends.

That’s it for today. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Joe and Toni’s new babies are Paul and Theo. Both were near 7 pounds. Everybody is doing well.

It was a short and uneventful hop to our second port in New Zealand. I continue to find the countryside remarkable.

Our primary focus was on rock art. We started with a visit to a rock art museum, which included a lot of information about the first New Zealanders. Because of their physical proximity, one might assume a good amount of similarity between aboriginal people of Australia and New Zealand. That isn’t at all true. The first Australians arrived about 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. New Zealand received their first humans, the Maori, about 1,500 years ago. They came from one of the Polynesian islands. We’ve seen a lot about early Polynesian culture, but somehow I missed this Mokihi (reed boat). These were small boats used to transport goods downstream. They basically served a function similar to river barges.

Our next stop was a limestone overhang that had some Maori rock art. It is harder to see than the much older cave art in the France / Spain area. In part this is because it is much less well protected from the elements. It’s also more accessible which means there is more graffiti. The rock art we saw depicted the Maori creation story. It is quite difficult to see the art in thee pictures I took, so I am substituting rock art that was photographed and enhanced by a professional.

After the rock art trip, we went to town and visited their museum. This very pleasant lady knows a lot about Kiwis. She had a picture of a Kiwi with the egg about to be laid. Essentially the egg takes up the entire Kiwi body. Did you know that Kiwis have the shortest beak of any bird? The formal definition of a beak is the distance from the nostrils to the tip of the beak. The Kiwi’s nostrils are right at the tip of the beak, making the length of their beak essentially 0, using the formal definition.

The museum also has a replica of the first plane to fly. Richard Pearse first flew his plane on March 31, 1902 — before the Wright brothers. Apparently, he was just fooling around and having fun. He wasn’t interested in turning his invention into a practical plane. For just fooling around, it was an incredible accomplishment.

That’s it for today. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Port Chalmers

We made it to New Zealand. The seas calmed quickly after we “turned the corner” and came to the leeward side of New Zealand. We took a train ride to see the picturesque Taieri Gorge. The operative word was “see”. The most interesting views were on the other side of the train. Coming back, they moved the engine to the other side of the train. They did not turn the cars around, so we missed some of the best views going both ways. It didn’t make that much difference, because taking pictures was impossible no matter we sat. There were strong reflections on the windows. The windows on our car were large, but incapable of being opened. Here’s the best picture I got. It looks more like a UFO beaming somebody up. Never the less, we saw an extremely interesting, isolated, and dramatic area.

When we got back to the ship, we decided to walk around Port Chalmers. This is a very small town. The local economy is obviously struggling. The town’s only coffee shop makes the worst espresso I ever had. But it is a very charming town. Here’s a picture of one of the churches.

Danita and I walked up to the lookout point. It was quite a climb. I had an interesting conversation with a local. Turning around to come back to the ship, I saw a hillside that was stunningly beautiful. Unfortunately, my camera turned it into a mundane waste of pixels. Trust me. If you were there, you would agree. It’s beautiful.

These flowers in somebody’s yard caught my eye.

The last pic is of a 19th century passenger cabin. If a captain had a first class passenger, he might put this cabin on the deck. Everybody would be delighted — provided a storm didn’t blow the cabin overboard.

We have a port visit every day for over a week. Everybody on board is delighted knowing we won’t have any sea days for a while.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Congratulations to Joe and Toni who had twin babies March 4. That’s all I know so far.

When returning to the ship, we have to go through security. It’s not usually extreme. Even those under 75 get to keep their shoes on. Sometimes HA (Holland America) runs the security, sometimes the local government does. When returning from Sidney, local government was running security, They confiscated my pocket tool, which is permitted by HA policy. It was no biggie. The next day I retrieved my tool from Guest Services. Last night, I received a note addressed to me (not us) that said “With our sincere apologies”, along with a plate of sweets. I was quite surprised. It was totally unnecessary, and totally fun.

We’ve been going through rough seas since we left Sidney. The captain canceled out planned stop at Milford Sound. For most of us, this was a one-hour stay-on-the-ship photo op, but there was the option of an overland excursion to visit New Zealand’s beautiful Fiordland National Park. If we had followed our original course, the seas were heavy enough that they might have damaged the ship. Nobody I know objected to the captain’s decision to reduce speed and go around the worst of the storm. Danita felt sea sick the first day. Yesterday she felt better. The most serious casualty was the fine whiskey store. They ignored the captain’s warning and did not properly secure their merchandise. Yesterday, their store was closed and they were packing up what little was left of their stock.

We have one other unrelated casualty. Mom got a new prescription from her doctor. Her normal mail order prescription service says they can’t deliver it and cancelled the order. I tried to get the doctor’s office to forward the prescription to the local drugstore. The doctor’s office doesn’t always answer the phone, preferring to call back. Fortunately, Mom has plenty of the old prescription on hand and it’s working good enough. I understand the doctor’s need to batch up their work, and everything is OK. But it’s not the best possible outcome for Mom. I’ll try one last time today.

That’s all for now. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We did an overnight stay at Sidney. One of the most iconic structures is the Sidney bridge. If you look extremely closely, you can see some dots above the bridge’s main arch. That is not an artifact. One can do a “bridge climb” that walks across the arch (for an extravagant fee). We didn’t do that, but we did walk along the pedestrian sidewalk at street level. We didn’t go all the way across, but we went far enough to catch an unusual angle on Sidney’s other iconic structure.

To get this shot, I snaked my phone under the fence, being very careful not to drop the phone. We took a tour of the opera house. It’s much larger than I imagined.

It’s worthwhile to include a more traditional view. The curve of the roof is supposed to represent the curve of the sails on some of the recreational boats in the harbor. The steps are supposed to be an echo of pre-Columbian temples — go up the steps, have a spiritual experience.

We took a tour of the Opera house. The building is stunning inside as well as out. Here’s a pic of the symphony stage. You can see some of the organ pipes in the back wall. I have it on good authority that the organ can fill the room. Count all the chairs on stage if you can. One of the few pieces that requires this large an orchestra is Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I don’t like that piece, so there was no chance we were going to attend a performance. But wouldn’t it be cool to hear Saint-Saëns organ symphony in this venue?

Another highlight was the Hyde Park Barracks. This is another prison settlement site. The exhibit was inside the barracks building. They issued audio headphones that sensed which exhibit you were near, and offered a first-person dramatization of a typical story for that exhibit. We topped our time in Sidney by attending mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral.

We have three sea days to get to New Zealand. The sea is quite lively with 12 foot swells. We are experiencing a lot of motion. I woke up several times during the night as normally inanimate objects skittered around. Hopefully the sea will settle down some tomorrow.

When prisoners were being sent to Australia, Port Arthur had the reputation of being hell on earth. The reputation was deserved, sometimes more than others. But it’s important to note that Port Arthur was not a penal colony. It was a place for secondary prisoners. England sent prisoners to a penal colony, where they provided labor, frequently to build colony infrastructure. Those prisoners who repeatedly continued their illegal activities were sent to a secondary punishment facility, such as Port Arthur. So while many of the stories of the brutal conditions at Port Arthur are true, the prisoners who arrived at Port Arthur have already blown their “second chance”. Further, it was still possible for a prisoner to get his “mind right” and get out of the penal system. Finally, while conditions were truly awful, the death rate of prisoners was about the same as the death rate of free people. Life in the 1800s was hard.

This building dominates the view when approaching Port Arthur. But when it was built, it had nothing to do with prisoners. The people of the city wanted their own flour mill. It was costing a lot of money to ship grain to the Australia continent and ship the flour back. Unfortunately, whoever decided to build the flour mill was an idiot. There was nowhere enough flow from the small river to power a mill. They tried adding treadmills which used prisoners to enhance the power available, but the combined power was still far below the needs of the mill. They finally gave up and abandoned the mill building. This project was an abject failure. There were some prisoners ibn Port Arthur, in their own prison building. Besides powering the treadmill, they also did lumbering.

Within a few years, the Australians saw the need of secondary punishment sites, They ended up building three. Port Arthur was the best suited site. Instead of a few prisoners to do logging, they now needed a much larger and more secure penitentiary. They decided to convert the flour mill. England sent prisoners to Australia from 1830 to 1853. While the influx of prisoners stopped, the men already incarcerated still needed to be managed. The prison at Port Arthur continued until the 1860s. It goes without saying that there was more punishment issued at the secondary penitentiaries. In the beginning, the primary punishment was whipping with a cat of nine tails. This punishment was viewed as inhumane. They decided to build the “Separate Prison”, which was very similar to solidary confinement today. Prisoners spent 23 hours a day in small isolated cells. The cells were totally silent. Guards communicated with hand signals. Prisoners were not permitted to speak. Prisoners who still continued to rebel could be moved to one of the punishment cells. These were smaller, had three foot thick walls, were isolated by four doors, and there were no lights. I didn’t get a decent picture of the Separate Prison. This shot comes from the internet.

You won’t be surprised to learn that shortly after they started to use the Separate Prison, they had to build an asylum. As the picture shows, the asylum is in remarkably good shape. Shortly after the penitentiary was shut down, the free people living in the area renamed their city Carnarvon and converted the asylum to the town hall.

Conditions at the penitentiary depended on the commandant. There were ten commandants. (The museum did a nice little riff on the ten commandments). The commandant had his own house for himself and his family. Each commandant modified the house to suit their needs. As a result, the commandant’s house climbs up the hill as the house was extended.

Most of the penitentiary buildings were destroyed or severely damaged by brush fires in 1895 and again in 1897. Eventually, the town found there was money to be made in tourism. They renamed their city Port Arthur. It was never very successful. There were insufficient funds to maintain the property. Eventually, the entire area was sold to the Australian government, and the last few people were moved out. Here’s a shot of the penitentiary from the back side.

As you can tell, we had an absolutely wonderful time in Port Author. Tomorrow is a sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.