Play day

Yay, another excursion on Saturday, April 8, in Port Chalmers, located in the southeast of the South Island.  This is the port for Dunedin, which was settled by Scottish explorers.  Actually, the name Dunedin means Edinburgh in Gaelic. 

Timber, dairy and kiwis are the main products of New Zealand.  We've seen a lot of timber in some of the ports.

The town center is built around an octagon, but we wouldn’t be spending time here.  We were heading on a bus to a place called Scenic Wonders, where we should see seals and were hoping to see penguins.  It seems as though we’re always on the hunt for penguins and don’t have a whole lot of luck seeing them.  So, we’ll try again.

This was the old railway station.  It's quite beautiful but I was only able to snap a quick shot through the bus window.  Would have loved to go see it.

 

This is some kind of sculpture that looks like giant teeth.

A bit over an hour in a bus would get us there.  We mostly stayed on paved highway, and then turned up a dirt road, steep and winding.  We saw lots of sheep, but I certainly couldn’t get a good photo of one.  It seems they know you want to photograph them and always give you “the look” and then turn away so quickly you never get the shot.  A sharp turn took us into the parking lot, quite a feat for a bus with 30 or so people on it. 

We were first offered tea or coffee and freshly-baked scones.  That was a very nice touch, plus they were really tasty.  Cruise ship passengers don’t like missing a meal.  Then it was time to get either into a small bus or onto an Argo, an 8-wheeled all-terrain vehicle.  We opted first for the bus.

The bus took us over a rutted road, deep ruts, and we bounced around like Bingo balls in the box before they spring them to be called.  It was ROUGH!!!  But we arrived at a lookout and got out of the bus.  We could hear noises … on my, it was a little seal just below us in the brush.  We were told to come away, as being above it made it feel threatened. 

Just around the corner of the walkway that has wooden fencing to keep people from going off the path, we saw a pond ahead to our left, and rocks and waves crashing to our front and right.  In the pond there were several baby seals frolicking.  It was so much fun to watch them dive under, come up and leap out of the water, jump over one another, play with each other.  What a wonderful life they have here in this pond while they’re young.

These little guys were having so much fun.

 

This was off in the distance a bit, looking as though he was getting a bit of sun.

Another pose struck by a baby.

This little guy was adorable.

They were still playing when we moved to get back onto the vehicles.

About a thousand babies were born this year, and this place is a good one for them.  It’s protected from predators, and they can spend their young time having fun.  They were great to watch, and so nice to see so many of them, slick little dark bodies, moving here and there.

We were then taken to a beautiful white-sand beach where we could see two sea lions in the distance.  No one walks on this beach as it’s protected.  Of course, seeing sea lions meant there would be no penguins there as they’d be avoiding their predators.  At this time the penguins are molting, so they are losing feathers and growing new ones, and are quite vulnerable.  We were taken to an enclosed walkway that goes down the side of a steep cliff.  We were hopeful to see penguins.  Nope.  It was very steep walking and we went to the end, not a far walk, maybe an eighth of a mile at most.  There were a few folks I didn’t think could get either down or back up, but we all made it.

The beach was beautiful, but no penguins here.

On the way back up we were taken up a second very short path.  Our guide opened a small viewing window and behind it lay a molting little blue penguin, its eyes peeping back at us.  No photos allowed so as not to disturb the little critter.  But it was enough to see it.

Then it was time to switch and we’d ride the Argos back to the base.  We’d been hopeful to see the yellow-eyed penguins, but no.  It wasn’t for us today.  We seem to have issues seeing penguins in the wild.  Another time, maybe.

It was quite the path we were riding on to get back to the base camp.

It’s a long ride to see anything from Port Chalmers, except if you were just going into Dunedin, but it was a good day.  We were out and about, and we did see something.  And we had sunshine.   We also dropped off the pilot we'd hijacked a few days earlier.  Good for him.

There are a lot of cargo ships going in and out of here, in close quarters.  I wondered if they had many collisions.

One of our little tugs was having fun doing pirouttes, showing off for his shipboard audience.

It's a narrow channel leading us out of town, and beautiful to sail through.

The next day, Sunday, April 9, we were to be doing scenic cruising through Fiordland National Park.  The last time we tried scenic cruising on a ship, our ship couldn’t get in.  This time we were graced with smooth water.  It was like glass and our park guide said in the 50 years he’d been coming here there’d never been such a spectacular day for sailing.
 

What a beautiful morning it was, with the sunshine on the water, the little islands, the mountains in the background.

We sailed through Dusky Sound and we saw lots of what were probably Dusky Dolphins as they run in larger pods, and there were maybe 40-50 of them.  They played close to the ship in the wake, near, alongside, under.  What a treat.

Fiordland has 14 fiords and consists of 3.1 million acres, which is 5 percent of the land mass of New Zealand.

The fiords were awesome, rising from the water and straight up, sometimes for hundreds of feet.  It’s amazing where this ship can be taken as the cliffs rose on either side, sometimes seeming so close you could touch the rock walls.  We stood on the deck for hours as we couldn’t get enough of the view.  We came out of Dusky Sound and along the end and back through Doubtful Sound, out Thompson Sound, and along the edge again.

It's pretty unbelievable where our Captain an take the ship.

Fiordland became a National Park in 1952 and a World Heritage area in 1986.

Fiordland gets more than 200 days a year with rain.

 

Believe it or not, this ship can make a pretty sharp corner.

We entered another sound.  There were small falls coming down, a larger falls.  And Milford, a little town at the end of Milford Sound.  We dropped off our ranger guide.  What a wonderful day it was … and then we were out, and back to the open water.

 

At the end of this sound with the great rocks rising directly out of the water is Milford, a very small town where we dropped off our park guide.

We learned that fiords are steep cliffs to the water, and sounds are gently sloping down to the water.  I'd say this is a fiord.  There are also hundreds of waterfalls here, that make it such a pretty place, but it was cool today.

Had to show some of the snow high up in the mountains.

 For the next two days (April 10/11), we were at sea, and close to the end of this cruise.  The water is calmer than it was on our first trip across the Tasman Sea.  We did do a few things those last couple of days … one of which was a culinary demonstration as there are a lot of Italian chefs on this ship, and we wanted to see how they do a few things as the pasta on this ship has been excellent.  “Cook with a passion,” was the message from Executive Chef Giuseppe Pollara.  A few stints in the gym, still haven’t played Bingo, and shedding crocodile tears as we packed up to move from our mini-suite to our balcony cabin.