Sydney by Public Transport

Silver Whisper cruised into Sydney's harbor as dawn was breaking on February 4, 2013.  We had a most photogenic sail in.  When Michael and I were last in Sydney in January 2010, we arrived by air.  Then we saw the Silver Whisper from above sailing into the harbor as we were landing.  This was the first time I had sailed in past the little islands in the harbor and under the iconic Sydney Bridge.  The approach to the city by water was much more beautiful than from the air. Coming in to Sydney Harbour is one of the great sights in the world.

When Michael and I took the same ship from Sydney in 2010 we traveled up the east coast of Australia to Hong Kong.  This time we are going around the bottom of Australia.  The only port in common, aside from the beginning and ending points will be Bali, Indonesia. 

Michael has been to Sydney many times.  In 2010, he showed me in just over 24 hours as much of the city as we could possibly see in such a short time. This time we had about six hours to see things we missed the last time.  First we stopped at Circular Quay (pronounced KEY) to get all day transit passes.

With day transit passes in hand we took a bus to Bondi Beach.  Bondi is the most famous beach in New South Wales, perhaps in all of Australia.  It sits on the Pacific Ocean several miles east of downtown Sydney. Moderate surf crashed on gorgeous white sand. There were sunbathers and surfers even on a Monday morning.  We walked along the beach, took pictures and used the free Wi-Fi to check e-mails. Then we took another bus to Watsons Bay, a small community at the end of the south headland protecting Sydney harbor from the Pacific Ocean.  On the route to Watsons Bay, we saw both ocean side lighthouses and sand dunes to the east as well as marvelous views of Sydney to the west.  We caught a fast ferry back to Circular Quay and the Silversea shuttle bus to Darling harbor and the Siler Whisper.  Michael and I saw some wonderful scenery and passed through parts of greater Sydney that neither of us had seen before.

We set out on foot to explore more of Sydney after a quick lunch aboard ship.  We walked along the quay and into the city toward Chinatown. Michael and I had taken the monorail that circles the Sydney central business district when we visited in 2010.  I was curious to see all the monorail cars passing by painted "Farewell Sydney." It turns out that the monorail will be discontinued at the end of February after 25 years of service.  It's sad to see something so much fun to ride end.  As we reached Chinatown, Michael remarked that the district is now larger than it was years ago.  It appeared to be busy and prosperous.  People of many Asian ethnicities and languages filled the streets.  We boarded a tram for a short trip to the central rail station.  After looking at this wonderful old building, we took a train back to Circular Quay and caught another ferry to Darling Harbour.  We certainly used our transit passes.  At the end of the day, we were exhausted but happy.  The sail out of Sydney Harbour was as beautiful as expected and an opportunity to relax.

Our time in the city was somewhat shorter than it might have been.  Michael and I moved from deck four to deck five during the changeover day in Sydney.  The ship staff did most of the moving for us but we needed to move the safe contents and pack our personal toiletries in our carry-on bags.  We could not access our new suite until the couple that had been there since Los Angeles left.  They had been told they needed to vacate the suite by 9:00 AM and they were going to use every minute of the time.  They finally departed shortly after 9 AM at the urging of the Guest Relations Manager.  Michael paced and I fretted while the housekeeping staff cleaned and set up the suite.  We were able to move our valuables, get new room keys by 10 AM, and start our day in Sydney shortly thereafter.  When we returned for lunch, everything had been moved and clothing, books and papers had been put in the same places they had been in the old suite.  Our new butler and room attendant introduced themselves.  Life was good; we now had a veranda.

Another Sea Day – Below Deck Tour of the Ship’s Stores

The Silver Whisper spent one full day moving from Tasmania to Sydney, Australia.  A highlight of the day was a Stores Tour offered to guests.  This gave me a chance to see the storerooms, refrigerators and freezers on 3 Deck where the food and beverages used during a cruise are stored. 

Deck Three is a crew only area as the lowest guest deck is Four. So we, the guests on this by reservation only tour below, were escorted through the door to the forbidden area by a security officer as well as the Stores Officer.  Once in the crew corridors, we walked around pretty much at will.  The Stores Officer showed us the storage room directly over the propellers.  It was extremely noisy but I doubt the packages of flour, rice and sugar and the canned goods stored there cared.  Things got a bit confused on the way to the beer locker.  The passageway was narrow and the walls had huge posters showing pictures of all the world's edible fish and shellfish.  Many stopped to look at the pictures.  Those of us who actually made it to the beer locker, which incidentally has some champagne and hard liquor as well as soda stored in it, were left standing alone for several minutes.  Typical of the independent spirit of Silversea guests, some of us started looking around the refrigerators and freezers on our own.  The Stores Officer was left explaining things to the few people who could get comfortably near him and were patient.

The rear of Deck Three is divided into various storage rooms in which dry goods are stocked by type.  Items likely to be used together are placed near each other.  Someone asked how anyone can fine items required, for example in the kitchen.  The storerooms seemed to be mazes of stacked boxes.  The answer is that the person responsible for finding and delivering the stores to the hotel side of the house is the one responsible for storing them when the ship is provisioned in port.  Each item must be checked off individually, out of stores and into the hotel.  The stores department keeps a computer inventory of everything received and used.

Produce is treated the same way.  Individual refrigerators are kept at different temperatures for storing fruits and vegetables at the optimum temperature for each type of produce.  Meats and other frozen products are kept in walk in freezers.  Again, they are at different temperatures depending on product and how soon it will be used.

Red wine is kept in an unrefrigerated storeroom.  There is a special refrigerator for white wine.

I learned that there is a two-story opening on the port side of the ship for taking stores on board.  The opening on the starboard side opposite it is only one story.  The provisioning officer prefers that the Whisper dock with the larger opening toward the pier at provisioning ports.  He can then use a forklift directly from the dock.  Otherwise boxes are loaded individually using a small conveyor belt when the smaller opening is used. Of course, the Captain docks the ship as he and the harbor pilot see fit.

It is always fascinating to see how the inner workings of a ship operate.

Tasmania: Feels Like the Land Time Forgot

The Silver Whisper arrived in Hobart, Tasmania on February 2 after two days at sea.  I spent much of the time reading and finished Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential".  I also attended a number of lectures and another cooking demonstration, billed as a contest between the restaurant manager and the cruise director and the cruise consultant and the human resources director. It was funny and fun. The guest tasters even said the food was good.

The crossing from New Zealand to Australia can be very rough sailing.  We had a relatively uneventful trip experiencing some heavy swell the first day. The weather stayed pleasant and guests reserved lounge chairs by the pool all day with their belongings even though this is against ship policy. The pool attendant will place a new chair on deck by the pool anytime someone asks. Either the guests don't know this or they are so selfish they do not care.

Michael had visited Tasmania twice previously, once in the late nineteen eighties and again about ten years ago.  The first trip was by air.  The more recent visit was by cruise ship from the direction of Melbourne. He was curious to see what changes Hobart had experienced in the past ten years.  Aside from a tall building with a strange looking windmill on its top, Hobart had changed little in the past thirty, let alone ten years.  We planned a walking tour combined with some shopping to take care of "infrastructure needs" and spend some of our Australian dollars.

Michael's first order of business was finding free Internet service.  The whole downtown appeared to have it but connection times were way too slow to be usable until we reached the Salamanca Market.  I wandered about the market and saw a combination of food products, nice craftwork, and tourist trinkets while Michael wrote e-mails and posted to Facebook. I did not find anything compelling although some of the things for sale were interesting.

We next walked up a steep hill to Arthurs Circus. The guidebooks said that original early Victorian houses lined a circular road that is the "circus".  We met a fellow Silver Whisper guest on his way down the hill.  He informed us that he didn't think there was anything there but a few old buildings of little interest.  Michael and I found them lovely examples of early Hobart history, very English.  Travel is totally wasted on some people. These are the same people who are constantly complaining that the weather is too hot or too cold, never right.

We continued through the Battery Point historic district and found it to have blocks of well-preserved buildings.  Many have been repurposed as restaurants and boutique shops. The area has an up-scale neighborhood feel.  Again, it all looked very English, except with palm trees.

We continued back toward the central business district, a longish hike.  Hobart has a mix of architectural styles that will never win any prizes but it is a real living city.  We searched out an enclosed mall for some Optician services (tightening screws on both our glasses) and a department store where I replaced my dead watch. We then walked to the other end of Hobart and climbed a hill to the Cenotaph Memorial to service members from Hobart killed in Australia's wars.  We had never heard of some of the conflicts listed there.  By then it was time to head back to our ship. A whirlwind tour indeed.

The Silver Whisper's visit to Hobart lasted hardly more than half a day.  One of the ship's tours was an all day tour of the historic prison site at Port Arthur. We sailed at 2:00 PM to pick up the tour participants and arrived off Port Arthur later in the afternoon.  Along the way, I photographed scenes of sailboats, dolphins and many wonderful vistas.  The prison is in one photo, a yellowish institutional building near the shore.  The area is now national park.  Tours are given several times daily, showing the ruins of the prison where Australia's worst of the worst criminals were sent. Solitary confinement and other kinds of mental torture were supposedly invented there.  The Silver Whisper anchored off shore and sent a tender to retrieve the twenty or so people who took the tour.

Perhaps the most memorable moment occurred as Michael and I were returning to the pier in Hobart.  We met a local woman near the former jam factory, now stores, offices and restaurants.  We exchanged pleasantries about the city.  Michael mentioned that Hobart has not changed much in thirty years.  She looked him in the eye and said firmly, "We like it that way."

Dusky Sound, Milford Sound

The Silver Whisper went through Dusky Sound in the morning of January 30 and through Milford Sound in the afternoon. They are fjords on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand.  Both are overwhelmingly beautiful palces.  Dusky Sound is more open with lower mountains (first two pictures).  Milford Sound is more dramatic with 5000 foot cliffs and 1000 foot waterfalls falling directly into the very deep water. 

Dunedin, the Most Scottish City in New Zealand

The Silver Whisper's visit to Port Chalmers, the port for Dunedin, New Zealand, was shorter than Michael or I would have liked.  Michael really wanted to see the small city of Dunedin, about half way down the eastern coast of the South Island.  He had only passed through it on a tour the last time he visited. 

Silversea was offering a number of interesting tours mostly to sites on the Otego Peninsula.  There would not be enough time to take a tour and see the city too.  After doing some research before we began the trip, I decided that I would rather spend the time seeing this small city of 123,000, but the fourth largest in New Zealand, than to spend hours in a bus to view penguins or albatross for only an hour or so.

Dunedin is New Zealand's oldest city.  It was settled in 1848 by Scottish migrants who gave it the Celtic name for Edinburgh.  It was a sleepy farming community until gold was discovered in central Otego in 1861.  Dunedin grew and profited from being the principal staging area for getting to the goldfields.  Although the gold played out in just a few years, the city remained with a legacy of magnificent Victorian stone buildings and New Zealand's first university, the University of Otego.

The Silver Whisper docked at Port Chalmers, about eight miles away.  Dunedin lies at the head of Otego Bay.  The bay is navigable by large ships only as far as Port Chalmers and we docked at the container port there.  The port has two of the largest cranes for loading cargo that I have ever seen.  There were also piles of logs awaiting shipment to China.  All of New Zealand is a major lumber producing area.  New Zealanders claim that it is a sustainably managed resource.  I'm inclined to believe them as New Zealand is the most environmentally sensitive country I've been to.  They never greatly messed up their environment and the government takes pains to keep it pristine.

There was, inevitably it seems, a large Princess ship berthed at the adjoining pier.  A great many large but not enormous cruise ships spend the Southern Hemisphere summer (U.S. winter) traveling between Australian and New Zealand ports on trips of a week to ten days.  The Silver Whisper has had company in all the New Zealand ports she has visited.  Michael and I were on the first shuttle bus to Dunedin as is usual for us, beating the rush from the larger ship.

We had picked up an up-to-date map from Whisper's tour desk. So we were prepared to take a walking tour of the city on our own.  The shuttle bus let us off at The Octagon, the eight sided central town square.  We viewed St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral, the City Hall, and the grassy area in front of the church which had a statue of Robert Burns, the Scottish poet.  A plaque by the statue said that one of the founders of Dunedin was a nephew of the famous poet.  The Dunedin Public Art Gallery looked interesting but was not yet open. We had not realized from the map that the Octagon area is on a steep hillside. It is fair to say that almost the entire city is on a steep hillside.  Seeing the sights proved good exercise.

We walked downhill on Stuart Street past the Victorian grey stone Law Courts, still in use today.  There appeared to be people lined up outside the door for parking ticket payment, awaiting the court's opening.  Across the street, the newspaper appeared to be still publishing.  Most buildings had awnings across the sidewalks.  Michael remembered pouring rain the last time he visited and was of the opinion that the awnings are to keep off wetness rather than sun.  Dunedin really looked like a city from fifty years ago.

We came to the Dunedin Railway Station at the foot of Stuart Street.  It was, as the brochure described it, 'a massive bluestone structure in Flemish Renaissance style, lavishly decorated with heraldic beasts, nymphs, scrolls, a mosaic floor and even stained glass windows of steaming locomotives.'  What a wonderfully curious building!  Nowadays, only the Taieri Gorge scenic railway runs tourist trains on two scenic routes, one year round the other seasonally.  Michael and I spent nearly an hour exploring this unique building.  The ticket office doubled as a gift shop and tourist office.  I purchased a lovely gold plated pin in the shape of a dragonfly, ornamented with iridescent paua shell.  Paua shell is the shell of an abalone relative native to New Zealand. It is gorgeous.

Michael and I stopped at the Otego Settlers Museum mainly to use the free Wi-Fi.  You will notice that we tend to live off the land as far as Internet access is concerned.  On board ship it costs $.35 a minute even with a pre-paid package. So we take every opportunity to find free minutes.

Dunedin was our last stop at a port in New Zealand and the last opportunity to spend our New Zealand dollars.  We had purchased toiletries at Bay of Islands and a watch battery, coffee and meals in Auckland.  I spent a little at Akaroa.  We still had about $20 New Zealand left. A visit to the Dunedin Chinese Garden took care of eighteen of it.  It was interesting to learn about the long history of the Chinese community in Dunedin and view the scholar's garden. Built in China and shipped to Dunedin for assembly, the garden was a reasonably authentic copy of a garden Michael and I visited in Shanghai in 2010.  Shanghai is a sister city to Dunedin; the garden was a joint Shanghai-Dunedin project.  The plants in the garden are required to be all native to New Zealand, as one would expect from such an ecologically careful country.

Michael and I climbed back up to the Octagon and waited for the Silver Whisper shuttle bus.  We had a fine show.  The Princess passengers with their key cards on lanyards and tour stickers such as tour 18 or tour 9 on shirtfronts entertained us as they tried to find the correct bus to their ship.  Our bus had not arrived yet so they couldn't go too far wrong.

We were scheduled to sail out at 3:00 PM but everyone was back on board early. We left shortly after 2:30.  From the top deck at the front of the Silver Whisper Michael and I watched our progress sailing out through Otego bay and into the open ocean.  We had cocktails and dinner while watching the east coast of New Zealand slip by.  It did not become dark until nearly 10:00 PM as were far south in the southern hemisphere.  Finally, we saw the Southern Cross as the sky darkened. 

We would spend one more day in New Zealand waters. Wednesday, January 30 we spent cruising into both Dusky and Milford Sounds.  The weather was uncharacteristically sunny and clear, the first time for Michael in other than rain and fog.  The pictures tell it all.

Akaroa, New Zealand

The Silver Whisper sailed into the bay, a flooded collapsed volcanic cone that holds the formerly quaint village of Akaroa at dawn on Monday, January 28.

Akaroa is a small, originally French settlement on New Zealand's South Island about 30 miles from Christchurch.  It usually has well under a thousand residents.  Michael and I planned to take the tender to shore and perhaps take a self-guided walking tour.  When Michael visited it about ten years ago, Akaroa was a sleepy little tourist town.  He found it so unmemorable that he recalled what he did there only after we looked at his old cruise photographs.  Well, things have changed.

After the 2011 earthquake devastated Christchurch, just about all the cruise ships have substituted Akaroa for the closed-for-reconstruction Christchurch.  Our arrival coincided with that of three other cruise ships, said to be an all time record for one day.  Tiny Akaroa was about to be overrun by nearly seven thousand cruise tourists. Add to that hundreds of New Zealanders on summer vacation, and the sidewalks and streets would soon be packed shoulder to shoulder.

We did two things right.  We took the very first tender ashore, arriving well before most of the hordes of tourists.  Next, we headed out of town. We walked by the ranks of waiting buses and headed out past some boathouses along a shore road that took us to a picturesque lighthouse.  Beyond that, we walked to the Britomart Monument (a small memorial to the British arrival just before the French), then took an uphill path to a road leading back to town. In all we had a three and a half mile hike and saw some pretty scenery.

Two of the three other couples we met during the hike were like-minded Australians from the Princess cruise ship.  They were on a one-week cruise from Melbourne, celebrating their summer holiday.  We had pleasant conversations about their and our respective cruises. The third couple said they were from Melbourne but appeared to be Japanese with little English.  They may well have meant that they cruised from Melbourne when asked where they were from.  They took lots of photographs of each other. Different cultures interpret a simple statement differently.

We met a local woman at the monument.  She gave us an impromptu talk about how the monument marked where the British ship, the Britomart, landed troops to prevent the French colonists from claiming the land at Akaroa for France.  England had signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori, establishing British rule, just months before the French ships arrived to plant a colony.  Fortunately, they worked things out without a war and the French became British colonists and Akaroa a town with French street names, a French cemetery and a Catholic church.  The woman who entertained us with the story worked in the Akaroa tourism industry on a dolphin sighting boat, and was escaping the crowds herself.  She recommended a few local tour operators with whom I'm sure she had a connection.  We thanked her and continued our hike.

As we came back into town, Michael spotted a number of people with laptops, I-Pads and smart phones clustered near the Akaroa library.  They had discovered a free Wi-Fi hot spot.  Naturally, he caught up on his e-mail, sent a few messages and posted a picture to Facebook.  I checked out the tourist information center across the street where I bought a lovely Chinese made New Zealand design T-shirt. 

We plowed our way through crowds of tourists, past a very young bagpiper giving a street performance (!), and onto the wharf to return the Silver Whisper for lunch.  I was able to persuade Michael to return later in the afternoon to see the streets of the old French village.  We had a pleasant time.  The farther we walked from the wharf, the fewer people were on the streets. That seems to be true everywhere.  The tourist crowds are not much interested in walking.  A few blocks beyond the shops selling tourist trinkets near the pier or wharf, the crowds thin out substantially. 

Tourists from the Princess ship, the largest of the four anchored in the bay, mobbed the far end of the wharf and their tenders monopolized most of the space.  Silver Whisper's tenders shared dock space with the tenders from a Seaborne ship.  In order for us to return to our ship, we had to wait for one of their tenders to depart before our tender could tie up at our small section of wharf  The fourth ship, a small expedition ship, apparently did not use the wharf at all.  If the ship was similar to the Silver Discoverer (formerly the Prince Albert II), it may have taken passengers ashore directly by using rubber Zodiacs.

Michael and I enjoyed another dramatic sail away from the deck behind the Panorama Lounge.