Month: February 2024

Original schedule is to do scenic crossing of New Zealands’s Fiordland but due to bad weather it has been canceled… A little disappointed on this one since it is one of unesco’s world heritage site… Oh well…. I love scenic crossings… You don’t need to get off the ship just stay at your own balcony and takes in the view….

Sailing in at dawn….

Port Chalmers is 20 mins from the next big city, Dunedin, beautiful scenic drive from Port to Dunedin via shuttle bus alongside otago Harbour bay

Charming town of Dunedin, full of Scottish heritage with many Edwardian architectures, cozy cafes and pubs. It’s a vibrant university town

The train station is famous and the second most photographed building after Australia’s opera house in this part of the world

So lucky to run into their vibrant Saturday farmers market where the locals shop

But the luckiest of all is to stumble into this Clearwater Wildlife tour to Cape Saunders Farm at the Otago peninsula where the owner Rachel of this thousand acre big farm led us to her sumptuous farm, from breathtaking cliff side views of the sea to totally private beaches and experience unrivalled opportunities to view rare yellow-eyed penguins, New Zealand sea lions, fur seals and a variety of sea and wading birds. After the previous three ports where we did not really explore much of the NZ nature, this one did it for us….. We wish we memorized all the names of the birds and wild lifes that we saw… Etc, we were just in awe… Feels like it’s a national geographic private tour as we were the only two guests on this Minivan….. They provided us each with a heavy raincoat and binoculars and we felt like clumsy explorers…

After the the tour we were in such a state of euphoria that the only thing we can do is to celebrate with a feast and drink of course…

We had a wonderful time here at our last stop of NZ…. Was supposed to do scenic cruising of NZ’s Fiordland tomorrow but was canceled because of bad weather….. So 3 sea days before we arrive Sydney Australia…

Happy Chinese New Year and have a prosperous dragon year everyone 💞

Again I apologize for as usual, everything was written in haste ( not enough time with internet) with a lot of grammatical mistakes…

Making our home away from home more like home

We were told the sail in and sail out scene at Picton is going to be marvelous and they are right!!…this is sailing in at dawn

The little town of Picton only has about 4200 people, our ship has 3000, so our arrival almost double the town population.. As soon as we stepped off the ship, we were each given a little fresh flower corsage pin as welcome gift… P immediately pin it on his hat and we do feel welcomed.

We joined a hop on and hop off wine tour which took us to around 17 wineries in Marlborough regent, world-famous for Sauvignon Blanc…. There’s also beer breweries…. The whole place feels like Napa but greener

To pick one restaurant out of all these stops and enjoy the vineyard dining setting is hard, but then we lucked out again by picking Saint Clair family estate… It has a great ambiance and delicious food… The platter we picked looks amazing and taste even better…. that plus two glasses of wine only cost us$60…

According to our very lively and funny destination expert Jessica, All these lumber at the Port are heading for China, turned into chopsticks and then maybe some comes back to New Plymouth

A charming seaside town apparently that has some landscape quite similar to Japan…. Including their ancestral Taranaki maunga (mountain) that looks like Mount Fuji… That is why Tom Cruise shot his last samurai here..

We walked 7 to 8 miles round trip on their award winning coastal walkway… Full of beautiful sceneries in order to reach Te Rewa Rewa bridge

The beaches are volcanic black sands that are very fine and amazing to walk on

Coastal blooms are colorful and kind of huge!! Reminds us of Ushuaia’s (end of the world Argentina) vegetation..

Seaside flea market…

Street views

We hit the jackpot on the random restaurant we picked off the street …. The ambiance is perfect and the food is amazing!! We normally don’t really eat fried food but everything on this seafood platter is delicious 😋…. The green lipped mussels are local fresh specialty, their coconut shrimp is the best we had ever tasted with long strand flavorful coconut shreds, soft shell crabs and calamaries tasted fresh as well… And the beer brewed locally tasted refreshing… So good we left a glowing Google review for them right on the spot 👍

…. Where they widened their eyes and stick out their tongues and chant to display a tribes pride, strength and unity.. The chants they make are powerful!! It was made world famous by the NZ All Blacks rugby team who performed this during their matches

When we started cruising 25 years ago, we dreaded sea days… At that time we were too introvert to participate in activities so we kept to ourselves and stayed inside the cabin…. Now we love sea days, especially without Wifi…between the activities the ship have (enrichment classes, zumba, ukelele and nightly performance) and our own (reading, painting, meditating computer stuffs and walk lapses around the ship ) we are actually quite occupied and busy…. There’s a lady who is 80 and told me besides all the activities that I am already participating in, she is also doing taichi and craft and misc games.. Etc… I don’t think she even have time to take afternoon naps like I do…

We were in the captain’s circle party today and they announced that the number one most seasoned traveler on this ship has traveled more than 2300 days in total with Princess… Unbelievable! The couple sitting next to us said this is their 5th world cruise, and they are going to keep doing it since it is very addictive…… Honestly we only showed up at the party for the free drink 🍷

Heres today’s Sunrise and sunset…. Strange we can see both on our side of the ship today… Turns out in the morning we are going north and in the afternoon we are going south… Trying to loop around the north island of New Zealand going from Auckland to New Plymouth…

Our goto way of checking out a Metropolitan city is to do the hop on and hop off bus.. Easy to get an overview of the city… And the double decker bus here has a glass top instead of open top..

New Zealands called themselves Kiwis… I thought they are talking about the fruit (for those in the know, yes, that is how ignorant I am)…. Turns out it is a flightless bird native to NZ… Lol

Auckland is very multi cultural with huge Asian community, so all over town there are sushi shops and Chinese restaurants with mandarin store signs… For a few moments we thought we were in San Francisco

So we picked a Indonesian restaurant for lunch and ordered Mee goreng, satay and gado gado…. My Singaporean friend knew what they are…

Thank you Auckland for giving us such a beautiful day and weather ! Warm sun, light breeze… We heard southern California is suffering from torrential rain and storm right now… Take care every one back home 😘

Can’t wait to explore Auckland….

The ship is super rocky today….very challenging to dance zumba on deck and also very challenging to perform ukelele on stage….. Yes it’s our turn to show everyone what we have been learning on sea days…… Hula dancers and ukelele players get together and put on a performance…. Super fun and builds up a lot of comradity 🙌🙌🙌, we were told if we don’t quite know what we are doing, just smile and fake strumming 😆

After learning some of the Hawaiian songs, one of them is very familiar to us since we were little, but in mandarin… I did not know 珍重再見was a Hawaiian song written by a Hawaiian princess who later became queen…. Love the Hawaiian, Polynesian culture, so relaxing and calming…. like the sea breeze, like the wave

Speaking of Princess, The Princess ship we are on is Island Princess….. An older ship of Princess but most importantly, one of the two smaller ships that are small enough and more suitable to cross the Panama canal. (crossing on 4/29)

Heres today’s sunset…… completely different from yesterday’s… “And I think to myself, What a wonderful world…”