So we spent the last hour relaxing on our verandah here on the MS Maasdam. While we finished off a bottle of bubbly, courtesy of our travel agent, we had time to observe the late afternoon activity at the Port of Otago…Otago being the name of the peninsula where our ship has been docked all day. The nearest town is Port Chalmers and the big city on the peninsula is Dunedin, population about 120,000. 

For such a lightly populated area, the port seems quite busy. With a backdrop of emerald green hills and a foreground of  turquoise bay water, the various fork lifts and other machinery of the port carry on their activities, which seem to consist of moving brightly painted containers from one stack to another. As we watched, the stacks at one end of the dock became taller, while at the other end they became shorter.

We wonder what all this constant activity means. Where are those containers destined? Do they contain supplies for this area? Outbound material for export? There is no way to tell from our perch on Deck 9 of the Maasdam, but seeing the name Maersk on so many of the containers I wonder if that is a company in which we should invest.

Today was our first ashore after three days at sea. Yesterday we did see land…Milford Sound and another fjord, but other than those magnificent areas, our world has been the ship and the sea as far as we could see. It began to feel rather strange and maybe naive, to be ensconced on this lovely ship with all of the glamorous touches of decor and style. 

There can be a complete disconnect on board ship from everything going on in the land-bound world. Yes, there is internet and each morning someone prints out a news digest which can be picked up at the front desk. If we wanted to, we could probably watch one of the cable news stations on our stateroom television. However, the atmosphere aboard discourages one from overly serious pursuits. 

Not all is totally frivolous. There are lectures and such on the culture of the places we’ll visit. Many activities on this ship emphasize nature with tours, talks and films on the environment of New Zealand.
But, it is easy to just float in a bubble of contentment. To live very much in the moment…whether it is a moment of gazing at the dawn sky, or spotting a waterfall cascading down a high cliff, or reveling in the antics of the seabirds. Maybe, this is what we need once in a while…a divorce from the reality of civilization and a chance to connect with the quiet beauty of our natural world.

Staying in a rented flat or apartment hotel  when traveling outside the US allows us to cook some meals instead of eating out three times a day. And cooking, of course, means grocery shopping, always an amusing and interesting activity in a foreign city.

Our first day in Sydney, stocking the larder landed first on our to-do list. Right around the corner from our hotel is a Woolworth’s…not the US drug store of our childhood memories, but a fully stocked multi-story grocery store. 

We strolled through the door only to be caught up in a cyclone of shoppers. Duh, we should have thought twice before venturing into a grocery store at 5:30 pm mid-week. Harried shoppers rushed around grabbing steaks here, veggies there, piling up their little green shopping baskets. We wandered the aisles in a post-fourteen-hour-flight daze, trying not to get trampled.

A tad overwhelmed by the crush, we limited our purchases to those items critical for our breakfast…crumpets, marmalade, apples, milk, yoghurt, bircher mix. Shaken, but un-bruised, we escaped to the street.

A couple of days later, we needed to restock the breakfast pantry and pick up  veggies and pasta for dinner. In a moment of clarity (still suffering from jet lag), we decided to shop a little earlier to beat the post-work insanity. 

Now this was fun! Like most big-city grocery stores, Woolworth’s reflects the diversity of the population and the breadth of products available in a cosmopolitan area. Gleaming veggies and lush fruits bore the proud, “Australian Grown” label. Aisle after aisle featured Indian or Asian cuisine. We had time to peruse the tinned goods aisle and marvel at all the ways the rest of the world comes up with to package staples like tuna fish. The candy aisle held us in thrall, but more on that in a future post! We love to buy products not available in the US…like real crumpets, fennel-fig paste, Bircher mix…(just add water or milk to oatmeal and dried fruit and refrigerate overnight! Yum!)

We filled to overflowing two little green shopping baskets. Overloaded with too many heavy sacks, we staggered back to the hotel, but no worries! That evening we savored a delicious dinner of pasta with fresh pesto cheese sauce (created from the cheese we bought at our previous day’s stop at the Smelly Cheese Factory) and a huge salad with the freshest, tastiest greens and veggies. 

As we have matured, my husband and I have found that we don’t have the stamina to rush around seeing three or four sights in a day when we are on vacation. We never really were that efficient, but we did pretty well with two, or sometimes three, like Notre Dame in the morning, Tuileries in the afternoon, and a boat ride on the Seine in the evening. It was easy in a compact city like Florence to go to the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace in one day and squeeze in a wine-tasting tour in the evening. Now, we find that one major “thing” a day is enough.

Before our sight-seeing day begins, we follow a routine that starts our day at a relaxed pace. We try to get into the routine the very first day so that the little housekeeping things we need to do become habits. 

Today, however, did not start like a typical first day. At 1:50am Bill’s phone screeched with a notice from our alarm company that one of the sensors had gone off. He woke me up and we panicked together. We’re over 7000 miles from home. We figured out what time it was in the states, decided it was not too early to call our alarm contact and a neighbor. They soon decided that there had been no break in. So Bill called our police department (luckily there had been no dispatch yet) to tell them it was a false alarm. Then he spent half an hour on the phone with tech support for our alarm company working through the various scenarios. By 3:00am we were back in bed and asleep within minutes.

I arose too early, but fell easily into my travel habits. While my husband slumbered on, I set up on my iPad the spreadsheet we’ll use to track our daily expenses to help us stay within our daily budget. Then I wrote in our journal the stories of our first two travel days. I pulled together the maps and vouchers we’ll need today. After Bill stumbled out of bed, we made a pile of our Aussie currency and divided it up equally, a third for each of us and a third for the safe in our closet. 

We breakfasted on crumpets with peanut butter and cups of black tea. One of the things we have found that really works for us is renting an apartment or staying in an apartment hotel such as this one, the Meriton. It is lovely to fix breakfast and enjoy a quiet time together before the activities of our day.

Then showered, dressed and fed we’re ready for the day…and our one planned activity…a cruise of Sydney Harbor.

Bill picked up our currency for Australia and New Zealand today. We like to arrive in a foreign country with enough cash to cover transportation to our hotel and the first couple of meals. Both of these currencies are pretty and colorful with handsome  images (several of prominent women) and intriguing security factors like transparent windows with holograms. Unfortunately the various denominations for Australia and New Zealand are exactly the same dimension and some are similar colors. So, a ten dollar Aussie note is easy to confuse with a ten dollar Kiwi note. This has me a little worried as the values are, of course, not exactly the same.

My concern stems from a very embarrassing moment in Prague last year. On our first night in town, we enjoyed a delicious dinner at a bistro near our hotel in the old center. I knew that my husband was low on cash so when the check came, I pulled out some bills. Several minutes after he picked up our cash, our waiter marched back to our table. An indignant scowl spoiled his otherwise handsome face. He sputtered as he slammed one of the notes in front of me. “A forint! A lousy forint! Worth nothing here! What are you trying to pull? Are you some crooks?”

I tried to slide under the table. Egad, I must have missed one of the 500 forint notes when we were exchanging them for koruna at the train station in Budapest. The Hungarian 500 forint and the Czech 500 koruna are very similar in size and color…but definitely not in value. Hungary has many denominations of bills and a 500 forint note is one of the smaller ones. I had proffered about $1.75 for the equivalent of twenty dollars. Oops! I stuffed the forint in my pocket and snagged a koruna from my wallet. Apologizing in French, the only language that came to mind, we slunk out of the restaurant.

For this trip, we’ll make sure to separate our Aussie and Kiwi money!

Originally, we planned a fourteen day cruise on Holland America’s Maasdam in the middle of what was to be a four-week Australia/New Zealand vacation. After listening to my struggle with arranging a post-cruise train tour of New Zealand, my husband asked, “Why not take another cruise? Isn’t there a ship returning to Sydney from Auckland?”

Of course there was a ship…the same one on which we would arrive in Auckland. At first I was dumbfounded at my husband’s suggestion. This is the man who for years was reluctant to cruise and now…28 days! Really?

As we talked about it, the advantages of our new plan because clear…extra days in each of our New Zealand ports and on the return cruise, a visit to Burnie, Tasmania instead of Hobart. Plus, we’d have a long day in Melbourne. Within minutes I phoned our travel agent who was able to book a cabin on the same deck for our second cruise on MS Maasdam.

And then we had to adjust our itinerary…changing our return flight on Qantas and booking a hotel for a long Christmas-shopping weekend in Sydney. Our trip grew from four to six weeks, but as retirees time is our friend.

I dream now of 28 days at sea…al fresco lunches poolside, walks along the promenade after dinner and views of the Southern Cross from our balcony as we cross the Tasmanian Sea. Of course, we’ll be off ship many days exploring the towns and countryside of New Zealand. I’ll share stories and photos of those adventures as we go along.