FIRST DAY IN AUCKLAND OR WHERE DID SATURDAY GO?

Auckland, New Zealand – 1 December 2008 – 07:00 (GMT + 13 hours, NZ Summer Time)

 

About to finish my instant coffee from hot water provided by the electric tea pot in the room and venture out for real coffee and a bagel. Finding the latter may be a challenge. Sorry I couldn’t make my Sunday morning coffee at Café Sole today since I’m 7500 miles away and a date late. Speaking of, I am watching CNN and was surprised I didn’t have the stock market info on the screen. It’s Monday for heaven’s sake, but not for the New York Stock Exchange. So easy I forget. The flight from San Francisco left Friday evening at 7 pm and arrived at 4 am Sunday morning yesterday, an hour early but only seemed an day late due to crossing the Date Line and still being 12 hours long. It feels a lot longer in economy I have discovered. I don’t know how many overnight 12 hour plus flights in economy I have left in me.

 

Nice hike yesterday to the top of the Rangitoto volcano. It’s very nice island wilderness preserve only a 30 minute ferry ride from downtown Auckland. The island didn’t exist 600 years ago. The locals watch it a lot. If it goes off again, it will be last thing they see. The climb to the top was only 1000 feet high, weather unlike today was cloudless and in the 80s making it kind of hot and sweaty. It will be 70 and stay cloudy today I think. Perhaps I’ll see a newspaper in the lobby of the hotel and find out. The hike was particularly fun since a 20-something gorgeous woman from Reunion Island (the part of France in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 1000 miles east of Africa) decided to walk with me when I told her I had been there. What fun to talk to someone like from an old Cary Grant movie, exotic and smart and clearly not telling me the whole story. She said she is a statistician who quite her job in London and is traveling the world. We talked until the ferry came by and then she disappeared into the crowd on the wharf to get a rental car to drive to somewhere else. Watched the equivalent of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade that seemed to include ½ the population of Auckland while the other ½ watched along the entire center of town, effectively stranding me across the street from my hotel until it was over. Lots of floats, most of which didn’t make any sense to me. I enjoyed particularly a marching band all dressed as kiki birds. I got a great picture of a kiwi playing a trombone followed by the Cat in the Hat, clearly the Aucklanders know the spirit of the season. I will post some pix to this when I get my promised free Internet access on the ship. I board tomorrow. Since I was able to check in—to a huge corner king bed room with views of the 1000 foot Auckland Tower and Auckland Harbour—at 6 am yesterday morning, I asked for late checkout at 2 pm tomorrow so I can go right to the ship. The Princes Warf is about 1 km from here, but a taxi will be best so I don’t look like Tevya going down the street with all my luggage.

 

I am thinking of another ferry today for a tour of Waiheke island if the temps are decent and it stays only cloudy. The brochure says Waiheke has “Vineyards, Beaches, Coastal Walks, and Olive Tasting.”

A 19,000 Mile Circle

I will arrive at 5 am two weeks from today in Auckland New Zealand, Star Alliance willing, to embark two days later on an additional 7,000 mile voyage back to Los Angeles, my starting point in late September. My cruise travel agent phoned me right after I paid for the recent Silver Shadow voyage from Los Angeles to Papeete with an offer for a “crazy deal” on Regent Seven Seas (was Radisson Seven Seas after it was just Seven Seas Cruises) m/s Mariner from Auckland to LA. The per diem would be ½ of that of the last cruise for about ½ the days; so it would be only (!) ¼ the price added for a trip back to SUMMER. I looked up the itinerary and said to him, “Hey, this cruise goes back to Tahiti right after I’ve just been there.” He said, “Is this a complaint?” He had me with that. The appeal of getting off the ship in LA only one hour time zone away and a 2 ½ hour flight away from Boulder was just too much to turn down. Oh well, it’s better than watching the money disappear without my doing anything with it. (Perhaps this will land me an appointment as Secretary of the Treasury. Makes as much sense as….)

Seven Seas Cruise Line started with one ship, the fabled m/v Song of Flower. Most of you know I was an Enrichment Lecturer in the 1990s for a number of yearly month long engagements on that converted ferry boat (but good), the precursor of the American style super luxury class cruise ships. The back of my head appeared for years in a picture of the “Pool Deck Café” in all the Song of Flower brochures, a picture taken in the Red Sea during the embargo of Iraq. (Make of that what you will.) I’m the guy with a towel around my shoulders looking quizzically at Bob Harrison, the fabled Crew Director, “JJ Stewart”, as he attempted to instruct the ship’s passengers in how to snorkel in the ship’s swimming pool, an activity not particularly craved since there was a viewing port in the library that allowed guests to observe the activities in the pool under water. (Make of THAT what you will.)

The upcoming cruise will “complete the circle”, LA to LA, on two ships and comprising a sea voyage of over 19,000 miles. Country count will go to 125 or so with the Cook and Marquesas Islands added, but who’s counting.