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.
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