Milford Sound, Port Chalmers & Timaru, New Zealand 2026
We have combined here three stops (two of which are ports) in New Zealand that were shortened by illness. Added together they amount to about the length of one normal (ie. healthy) port.
Milford Sound
We reached New Zealand on March 10 after two days at sea. At the end of our last episode Rick was hoping that two sea days would be long enough to recover from his illness (mostly cough and sore throat), but it was not to be. As we sailed into what we think was Milford Sound in southwest New Zealand Rick was still ill. But this was cruising only, not a port, so Mary reluctantly agreed to his going on deck for a while to view the scenery.
It was a beautiful day, though a bit chilly and breezy. We had been here before, a longer visit with more commentary that you can see here:
https://baderjournal.com/2018/06/25/fiordland-national-park-new-zealand/.
We only stayed on deck for a short while, but here are the pictures we took. The scenery here just never stops and all of it is beautiful.
Port Chalmers & Dunedin
March 11 brought us to Port Chalmers on the east coast of the south island of New Zealand. Port Chalmers is a nice small town of a couple thousand people. It serves as the ocean port for cruise ships visiting Dunedin, which at more than 130,000 is one of the largest cities in New Zealand. We saw a good bit of this area on our first visit here 8 years ago, which you can read about at this link: https://baderjournal.com/2018/06/22/dunedin-port-chalmers-new-zealand/.
Rick was still feeling a little weak from his illness, so we decided to ride the shuttle into Dunedin and see the library (closed for Waitangi Day on our first visit) and some local art. The bus took us along the seashore and dropped us off at the Octagon, the center of town. The city’s most important buildings are arrayed around the Octagon and within a couple of blocks from it. We headed first for the library, which was nicer on the inside than one would have guessed from its rather plain exterior. There was a knitting group working in a relaxing looking area inside.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the seat of the Dunedin Anglican Diocese, sits across the street from the Octagon. The first church on this site opened in 1863 and in 1894, after years of dispute, it became a cathedral. The current building was consecrated in 1919 and the current chancel was put into use in 1971.
The cathedral is made of stone with towers on each side of the main entrance and flying buttresses along its sides. It sits on an incline uphill from the Octagon, so it has long and steep stairs to the front entrance but the rear entrance (where we exited) is closer to street level. The inside has a high vaulted ceiling, a large pipe organ in a wooden housing and a number of stained glass windows.
Over the front entrance facing the altar is the Memorial Window, commemorating those from the area “who gave their lives in “THE GREAT WAR 1914 –1918” according to a plaque mounted under it. We have also included here another of the stained glass windows, with a closeup showing that it includes images of local animals such as seals, sea lions, penguins and albatross. The cathedral also has a very nice carved stone pulpit (with another stained glass window behind it). While we were there we were happy to see a poster in several places for the Dunedin Pride Church Service, “A Queer-affirming celebration for everyone.” On the hill outside the church was a nice set of row houses in a rather old fashioned style that complemented the cathedral’s.
Before going to the library we stopped into a very nice information office full of brochures and displays. Mary had read that they have free art walking tour maps for visiting the city’s many outside art displays. We followed it for a while. Dunedin is a Scottish name (from the Gaelic name for Edinburgh). It was founded by Scots and the older buildings have a Scottish feel to them. So it was not surprising that there was a large sculpture of the poet Robert Burns (whose nephew was one of the founders of this city) just off the Octagon. In the brick plaza around the statue were a number of small plaques honoring writers and artists from Dunedin. We also saw several by-ways and passages with large murals painted on building walls.
The walking tour map had more to see, but Rick was tiring since this was his first day out after several days of illness and recuperation. So we headed back to the Octagon to catch the shuttle back to the ship. On this walk we saw Dunedin’s beautiful train station, which we had explored on our last visit, about two blocks down from the Octagon. We also stopped into the Dunedin Public Art Gallery across the street from the Octagon. It was pleasant but not all that interesting to us. Walking through the small park in the Octagon we saw a red aluminum copy of a Maori doorframe, a low wall with a mural of penguins, and a group of the sea gulls who frequent the Octagon bathing in a water fountain. Sadly, the only gelato shop we found in this area was closed.
The shuttle returned us to the cruise terminal in Port Chalmers. We stopped into the nice little Port Chalmers Library across the street from the cruise terminal. On one of the library’s walls was a plaque marking the spot where the pioneer settlers disembarked from their ship in March of 1848 to found the town and the province. Before reboarding the ship we walked up the hill a couple of blocks to find a pharmacy because we were out of cough medicine, which Rick still needed.
Timaru
Zaandam was docked at Timaru, New Zealand, on March 12. Rick’s illness seemed to be pretty much over this morning apart from lingering fatigue, but now Mary woke up with a sore throat (is that fair?). She decided to stay in bed rather than go into Timaru which was, let’s face it, not an unmissable spot. There was a shuttle bus to take passengers to the center of town and Rick eventually decided to go in at least briefly, mainly because a museum with some ancient Maori rock art was right at the shuttle drop off.
There was a beach next to the ship that we were told was a habitat for New Zealand Little Penguins, but it turned out that they spend the days hunting at sea and only come ashore at night when we would be gone. Rick walked over to that side of the ship anyway to see if he could spot any stragglers but only saw a couple of sea gulls. Oh well, it was a longshot. When he got back to the room Mary announced that she had decided to go into town too. So off we went around noon.
Timaru is a small city with a population just under 30,000. The area has probably been populated by Maori since at least the 14th century and the city’s name comes from their language. Europeans first came here in 1839 when a whaling station was established but real settlement began in 1859 with the arrival of more than a hundred immigrants from England. After several shipwrecks along the coast a large breakwater and an artificial deep water port (where our ship docked) were built, mostly during the 1870’s. This construction caused sand moving down the coast to form sandbars that created Caroline Bay with its popular beach.
The shuttle dropped us off in Heritage Place, the historic center of town. An open air vendors’ market was in operation there (some of our friends had seen a number of the same vendors in Port Chalmers the previous day). Behind it in the picture you can see the Landing Services Building, the oldest building in Timaru. First opened in 1871, it is built of local bluestone. Before the port was built this landing service was needed to ferry cargo to and from ships anchored off the shore. The building’s location was at the oceanfront at that time (now some 1300 feet from the water). The visitors’ center is now located in the Landing Services Building as is the small museum with Maori rock art. We decided that the museum was overpriced so we skipped it.
What we didn’t skip was the library, which was a few blocks’ walk away. We managed to lose our way as we walked there, but a nice local woman stopped and put us back on the right path. The library traces its history to 1862 when a public reading room opened in a school building. In 1909 a new building financed in part by Andrew Carnegie opened to house the library and, a few years later, the city council. The current library building opened in 1979 when the Timaru government took over the old building. We walked past the former library, now the Timaru Council building, on our way to the library. The attractive clock tower was added to the building in 1934.
The library is a very modern and nice one. As we saw in two other New Zealand libraries, it hosted a knitting circle. There was a nice children’s room with an interesting frosted glass door. The fountain in front was contributed by the local Rotary Club.
We walked back to the shuttle stop along Stafford Street (we think), the main business street of the town.
During the relatively short shuttle ride back to the pier we had a view of what we think was Caroline Beach and also a distant glimpse of two of the venerable churches in the city, which are almost right next to each other. The blue roofed towers belong to the Sacred Heart Basilica, a Catholic church that opened in 1911 in a location where a wooden chapel was first built in 1874. The closer square tower is part of St Mary’s Anglican church, which opened in 1886 with the tower added in 1910.
We were glad we went into this nice town populated with friendly people. We didn’t see everything here but for a short walk we were pretty satisfied. This pretty much concluded our bout with illness as we sailed away for a much larger and more important New Zealand port.
Sydney, Australia (overnight) 2026
On the morning of March 06 we were docked in Sydney for an overnight visit. Sydney has two cruise ports, which you could just call good and bad. The good one is Circular Quay and is right in the center of town between the opera house and the bridge, while the bad one is called White Bay and is far from anything interesting, so a lengthy shuttle or cab ride is required to see or do anything worthwhile. The conventional wisdom is that ships small enough to sail under the bridge are sent to White Bay while the larger ships dock at Circular Quay near the opera house. On our two previous visits here, on the old Amsterdam that was a sister ship of Zaandam, we were sent to White Bay, but this time we were docked near the opera house even though we were small enough to sail under the bridge. We aren’t sure why, especially since the HAL World Cruise was in Sydney at the same time we were this year. But it sure was a major difference. We ate breakfast by a window looking out on the harbor bridge. How cool is that?
As I said above, this was our third overnight visit to Sydney and you can see the other ones at these links:
https://baderjournal.com/2016/02/28/sydney-australia-day-1/
https://baderjournal.com/2016/02/29/sydney-australia-day-2/
https://baderjournal.com/2018/06/27/sydney-australia/
We decided on the first day to ride the Hop On Hop Off (HOHO) Bus around Sydney. We had walked around before, of course, but we have found in other cities that the HOHO bus will often take you places you might not otherwise see & it can provide a useful orientation to the city. Its first stop was about a block from the port so after breakfast we walked over there to buy tickets along with our friend and tablemate Karen. This part of Sydney is interesting, among other things, for the dramatic contrast between old Victorian buildings closer to the dock and soaring skyscrapers looming over them from not too far away. From the top level of the bus (by far the best place to sit if you want to see the city, unless the weather is bad) we could look up at these tall modern buildings as we drove beneath them.
So here are some things we saw on the bus ride that we found notable. All these photographs are from the top of the bus since we didn’t “Hop Off” anywhere. thinking instead we would visit some of these places on foot the next day. First, we drove past the Art Gallery of New South Wales, founded in 1872. Its current building opened in 1897, with additions added several times thereafter. Just under the top of the building are arrayed the names of 32 famous artists who had no works in the gallery at the time it opened. The two equestrian statues, called The Offerings of Peace (left) and The Offerings of War, have been there since 1926. Second, the Sydney Tower is the tallest structure in Sydney. Opened to the public in 1981, the Tower is more than 1,000 feet tall.
The Central Railway Station is the largest and most used station in Australia, averaging 250,000 people per day. Sydney’s first train station opened near here in 1855 and the current structure opened in 1906. It is on the site of a former cemetery, requiring the relocation of the remains of more than 1,000 people before construction began. The 281 foot tall clock tower was added in 1921.
One Central Park is a mixed use (residential and commercial) building that opened in 2013. It is notable for the vertical hanging gardens covering most of its outside walls. It is the tallest vertical garden in the world. The gardens are hydroponic and are made up of some 85,000 plants, including more than 250 Australian species.
Crown Sydney (sometimes called One Barangaroo for its address) is the tallest building in Sydney.at 890 feet. It has 75 floors. It opened in 2020 and includes residences, a hotel and a casino. It has been quite controversial throughout its development and continuing today, with opponents labelling it “Packer’s Pecker” because of its rather phallic shape (James Packer was chairman of Crown Resorts when the building was constructed).
As the tour ended we passed by the Harbor Bridge and drove up the street to the spot where it began.
A park was next to where we got off the HOHO bus. In the park was a statue of William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, who was the fourth governor of the convict colony here from 1806 to 1808. The park also had some nice flora, including the flower below which was new to us. Looking for a nice place for lunch we walked around awhile and ended up back by the cruise terminal, which had a sign that helpfully told us exactly where we were. Still looking for lunch we walked down the waterfront further into Circular Quay and found a place serving fish & chips. On the way we passed an ibis; we had seen some in the wild in Darwin but in Sydney they frequent places where they might find food dropped by humans (kind of like pigeons in the US). This whole area looks a lot different from what we remembered from our first two visit and we think the place where we had the fish & chips was new since then. After lunch we had gelato (of course) before walking back to the ship.
After dinner we came out on deck 3 on our way back to our room to see if there were any nice twilight pictures to be had. There were, of course. Before the sun set we got a picture of the opera house and another of a bunch of yellow ferry boats at the end of the quay. After the sun set and all the lights came on, we had pretty spectacular views of the opera house, the Harbor Bridge, Luna amusement park on the other side of the bay under the bridge, and a row of buildings at the inside end of the quay that we think might be where we had lunch. It appeared after dark that there was a party going on at the opera house, since we could hear loud music all the way to the ship, but we were told later that they had moved a concert outside there. These nighttime sights were all new to us because we had never been docked in this area before.
Well, we had hoped on the second day to visit on foot some of the places we had seen from the HOHO bus but it was not to be. On our last visit here Rick was sick and only stirred from the ship for the opera in the Opera House because the tickets for our group were in his name. Surely that couldn’t happen again, right? Wrong. By the morning of March 26 Rick was in no shape to leave his bed, much less the ship, so we stayed on board all day. (If this happens a third time it will probably be our last visit to Sydney.) He was feeling a little better by sail away time (around 5:00 PM) and prevailed upon Mary, against her better judgment, to agree to his joining her on deck 3 (not far from our cabin) to watch the ship’s departure.
It was foggy and gray, but sailing through Sidney harbor is always worth seeing. We ended up with dramatic pictures of Luna Park, the Opera House, and Denison Island (used for punishment during early convict days and fortified in the mid 19th century, although its armaments were obsolete by the time it was finished). There was, as usual, a group of climbers on top of the Harbor Bridge as we passed (this is a popular, expensive and physically demanding tourist attraction).
So that was the end of our visit to Sydney (the second less than optimal one in three tries) and of our visit to Australia. We headed out into the Tasman Sea for a two sea day trip to New Zealand, which Rick hoped would be sufficient time to fully recover.
Hobart & Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia 2026
Hobart, Tasmania
We docked in Hobart on the morning of March 3, the first of two days in Tasmania. Once known as Van Diemen’s Land, Tasmania is a large island off the southeast coast of Australia that is also an Australian province. Hobart is its biggest city at about a quarter of a million and also its capital. The city dates back to 1804. We visited here the first time in 2018 and the blog entry for that visit includes many of the same places we visited again today (along with some we didn’t visit again) with background information we will try not to repeat too much here. You can see that Hobart visit here:
https://baderjournal.com/2018/06/29/hobart-tasmania-australia/
We didn’t have anything we particularly wanted to see here this time so we decided to spend our time in port walking around the city, since this is a very pleasant walking city. Accordingly, after breakfast we exited the ship and walked along the water around the edge of the port. Hobart, which is closer to Antarctica than to Perth in Western Australia, is considered a “gateway” to Antarctica. As we walked along the waterfront we encountered a set of bronze sculptures collectively called “Heading South” that commemorate Hobart’s Antarctic connection. Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi, the first Australian to winter in Antarctica in 1898, is shown taking a self portrait with his dog Joe. Nearby are sculptures of penguins and seals standing on rocks in the water. These were all installed here between 1998 and 2002.
We walked on for a while, visiting a few shops and passing replicas of the wooden huts used by Sir Douglas Mawson during his 1911 expedition to Antarctica (the originals are still in Antarctica). Eventually we came to the Hobart Town Hall, the seat of the city’s government. The building has been used for this purpose since 1866. Some very bright flowers were planted in boxes in front of the building and on one wall was a modest memorial to Captain Cook that was installed in 1970 on the bicentenary of his first visit to Australia.
Not far from the town hall we came to Franklin Square. Established in the 1860’s to be a public meeting area in the center of town it has often been a venue for political demonstrations. The centerpiece of the 1.6 acre park is a fountain topped by a statue of Sir John Franklin for whom the park is named, an Arctic explorer and public official of Van Diemen’s Land during the 1830’s and 40’s. In the park was a clever sign warning about the current state of the internet.
We headed toward the library but on the way we walked past St David’s Cathedral, seat of the Anglican diocese of Tasmania, and a sign indicating that Tasmania’s idea of a nutrition pyramid may be very different from ours.
The library is in what looks pretty much like a nondescript office building. The building houses the State Library of Tasmania, a reference and research facility, and the Hobart Library, a public lending library. Hobart’s first library opened in 1849 and only served subscribers but was opened to the public in 1860. It closed in 1867 but a new public reference library opened in the town hall in 1870. Andrew Carnegie paid for the library to move to new quarters in 1907 with the requirement that a free lending service be established, and it has been in its present building since 1962. Inside the library was open and airy. On the ground floor was a museum mostly displaying furniture and other artifacts from early settlers, but it also had an interesting exhibit about how semaphores were the only means of communication with other communities in Tasmania in the early days. The librarian at the front desk was very welcoming and quite interested in the voyage that brought us here.
Not far away we came to the rather distinctive City Hall, Opened in 1915 in what was previously a market area, this is not a government building despite the name. It is a venue for sport and entertainment events, having hosted over the years boxing matches, basketball tournaments, silent movies, a ball for Queen Elizabeth and the Miss Australia Grand Finals. We were pretty confused when we spotted it, having already visited the town hall, which is actually the seat of Hobart’s government.
It was a fairly long walk to get to Salamanca Place. This venue consists of rows of buildings that were once warehouses for the port but have since the 1990’s been converted into shops, and restaurants. There are several narrow pedestrian lanes between sets of buildings and large open squares among the buildings with small apartment buildings and hotels as well as shopfronts, sculptures and fountains. We had been here in 2018 and actually bought something at a yarn store that we managed to find again today. One side of a square in which we sat down for a few minutes was a rock wall that we understand used to be part of a quarry. One sculpture, called “Happy Birthday Mr President” resembles a famous photo of Marilyn Monroe standing in high heels above an air exhaust with her skirts billowing around her. Our picture, unfortunately, only reaches the top of her head and not the bunny ears sprouting out of it. Several buildings on one side of the complex constitute the Salamanca Arts Centre.
We were getting tired and hungry so we headed back along the waterfront toward the ship. We had fish & chips for a late lunch at a place called Mares Seafood where we had eaten in 2018, which is in a building quite close to the dock. It was (as always in Australia) very good and afterwards we stopped for some gelato at a window on the side of the building. So ended day one in Tasmania.
Port Arthur, Tasmania
On the morning of March 4 we were anchored in Carnarvon Bay by Port Arthur, just 60 miles from Hobart. In fact they are so close that you can usually take a ship excursion here from Hobart, but since the ship was coming here the next day we didn’t. When we visited Tasmania in 2018 we were scheduled to stop at Port Arthur after Hobart but were forced to skip it because of a cyclone (which we were caught in anyway, quite an adventure in itself). The thing to see here is the old penitentiary for convicts transported from Britain.
It was a beautiful day as we tendered to the dock on shore a little way up the shore from the prison. We walked up to the visitors’ center and took in the informative but disturbing displays there, some of which appeared to be of questionable accuracy, then walked down the hill to the prison area. Port Arthur began in 1830 as a timber settlement but by 1833 it had become a penal colony focused on repeat offenders among the convicts transported from Britain. While these were described as hardened criminals, it should be remembered that many offenses that would be considered minor today were treated much more harshly at that time, with relatively small thefts often being punished as capital crimes. Port Arthur involved harsh punishments but also incorporated what was considered more enlightened concern with rehabilitation, although some of the psychological techniques for that proved quite harmful to prisoners’ mental health.
The prison was closed in 1877 and over the next few decades the buildings deteriorated, a process greatly exacerbated by two large fires during the 1890’s. While it had been something of a tourist destination for some time, in 1979 an effort to restore the site began (and seemed still to be active when we were there). In 2010 Port Arthur was one of 11 Australian prison sites designated collectively as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Today it has more than a quarter of a million visitors per year.
We began our visit in the main penitentiary building along the waterfront. Inside we saw the remains of some of the small cells on the first floor where difficult prisoners were kept in darkness and silence, often with hoods over their heads to eliminate all social and environmental contact. The theory apparently was that this kind of extreme isolation would encourage them to reflect on their misdeeds, but it actually caused deterioration of mental health.
Overlooking the entire prison was the Guard Tower on top of a large retaining wall. It is round and fairly tall with a crenelated top, looking rather medieval. There are two smaller side towers in a similar style, one on each side. This was built in the mid-1830’s by inmates of an associated prison for boys not far from the penitentiary.
In the first picture of the guard tower above you can just see on the left part of the picture what we think is the Commandant’s House peeking over a wall. It was expanded in the 1840’s and briefly became the Carnarvon Hotel after the penitentiary closed. Rick climbed up and walked through the house, which was small but nice, its best feature being the view over the bay from the front porch. The Commandant lived well away from the convicts, strategically located with the guard tower between him and them.
We walked further up the hill toward the hospital ruins. It was built in the early 1840’s and had a capacity of 70 patients, with soldiers and officers in a separate ward from the prisoners. The building was badly damaged in the fires of the 1890’s which left it pretty much in the condition it is seen in now. On the way back down the hill we saw the Law Courts building. New prisoners were lectured here on the prison’s rules and hearings on rule violations for all prisoners were held here as well.
Walking back down the hill gave us a different perspective on the buildings than we had on the way up. We had had enough of this rather depressing place, so we headed back to the tender dock, then to the ship. .That evening we sailed away from Tasmania.
Melbourne, Australia 2026
We spent the 1st of March in Melbourne, the capital and largest city in the state of Victoria. With a population of almost 4.5 million it contains almost a fifth of the entire population of Australia. There is more background in the post of our first visit, in 2018, most of which will not be repeated here. But you can take a look: https://baderjournal.com/2016/02/26/melbourne-australia/.
One day is certainly not enough to fully explore a city of this size and we had seen some of the things at the top of our list last time. We decided this time we would go into the city and follow (loosely) a walking tour Melbourne has published to see Aboriginal art. The maps were available near the city hall so that is where we headed after breakfast. We had thought about walking into town (maybe 2 miles) but as you can see in the picture the skies were dark and cloudy and rain was forecast. Melbourne’s excellent tram system had a stop across the street from the dock, so we bought return tickets and boarded the tram. An older local fellow bent our ears for the whole trip about the places he thought we should visit but, although he was just being nice, we had already planned our day. We left the tram very close to the town hall, visited the information office for our map and sat down on a bench. While Mary studied the map I took a few pictures, of some very red flowers, of a small sculpture of a dog on the sidewalk, of the Town Hall and of the interesting 1932 Art Deco Manchester Unity Building.
We walked to Spring St, which has been the center of government here since the mid 19th century, and a number of grand old Victorian era buildings are still in use there. Parliament House was the centerpiece and is the reason this is considered the center of government. A long building in classical style fronted by a row of pillars, it was originally built in the mid-1850’s with additions over the next few decades. But it has never been completed, most conspicuously the dome in the original plan is still missing. It was the home of the Australian Parliament while Melbourne was the national capital in the early 20th century but now it houses the parliament of Victoria.
The front steps of Parliament House are often the venue for political demonstrations. We visited there on the day after the commencement of the US war against Iran and there was a small group of demonstrators on the steps. There were no signs and no slogans and no speeches (at least while we were there) so we weren’t entirely sure what their position was. They had an Israeli flag and an Australian flag along with four Iranian flags, so that seemed like a rather mixed message. But we have learned since that the Iranian flags they were flying, with a golden horse in the middle, were abandoned by Iran at the time of their Islamic revolution and the golden horse was replaced by a red and white design. Apparently the old flag is used today by people seeking an end to the Islamic state and a return to the old government. So that seems to make the demonstrators’ message clearer as support for the attack on Iran the day before. Still not sure, but that is what seems likely.
Across the street were some more notable Victorian buildings. The Princess Theater dates to 1857 and was rebuilt in 1886. It is the oldest entertainment venue on the continent of Australia. The Windsor Hotel (once known as the Grand Hotel) first opened in 1884 and was greatly expanded in 1888. It is the last of Australia’s 19th century grand hotels.
This area had a good bit of green space, including several parks decorated with statues and other public art. Next to the Parliament House was a sizeable park with some statues, but the only pictures we have are of some of their beautiful flowers. In front of Parliament House was a mosaic with an Aboriginal motif copied from an 1890 painting. This commemorates the area’s history as a traditional gathering and ceremonial place of the Kulin aboriginal people who lived here.
To the right of Parliament House was a small park called Gordon Reserve. It contains a statue of Charles George Gordon, a much admired English general who died defending Khartoum in Sudan in 1885. The statue was erected in 1887 and is a copy of a statue that once stood in Trafalgar Square in London and now sits on the Victoria Embankment in front of the British Ministry of Defense. Also in Gordon Reserve is an elaborately sculpted fountain in a Victorian style. Called the Stanford Fountain, it was installed in 1871 shortly after its creator, William Stanford, was released from prison where he had been since he was about 15. The fountain was made of bluestone from the prison’s quarry. While difficult to see in our photo, the central pillar is adorned by the figure of a boy. Stanford died in 1880, reportedly from inhaling too much stone dust.
Earlier in this area we happened past what we think was the Old Treasury Building, opened in 1862 and now a museum. What was notable was the nicely dressed wedding parties standing outside, apparently waiting for their turn for a ceremony since the Marriage Registry for Victoria is in this building. Unfortunately we were looking for the Parliament Building at that time and neglected to take a picture, but it was still worth noting.
We left the Spring Street area to walk to what is apparently the motherlode of Aboriginal Art at the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria (called NGV). This was a pretty lengthy walk along city streets, passing several blocks of what appeared to be old commercial buildings (except for one that said it was a mosque) and along a street overlooking the railroad tracks. The Gallery building had a very distinctive modern design on its front facade. The NGV was founded in 1861 and has more than 75,000 works in its collection in several locations. The Potter Centre opened in 2002 to house the NGV’s Australian art collection, numbering some 20,000 works. This is a beautiful museum where we spent most of our time with the Aboriginal art, although there were a number of rooms containing other Australian art.
Our next objective was the Melbourne City Library. On the walk there we passed the statue of Matthew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate Australia in 1802. It was erected in 1923 outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Swanston Street. It took a while to find the City Library, located on a side street with only a very small sign. It is a little small for a city this size, but Melbourne has a number of other library locations. Note that this is the city’s central public lending and research library, not the fabulous State Library that we visited on our first visit.
One more thing on the must do list before returning to the ship was to find a gelato shop. It turned out there was a very good one on a pedestrian lane running right next to the library. The lane was called Degraves Street and the shop was called Piccolina. There were several cafes nearby and tables with umbrellas out in the street. The tables were full, but as we came out of the gelato shop a nice fellow who had finished his meal stood up and offered us his table, which we gratefully accepted. Melbourne has a number of these relatively short and narrow pedestrian lanes which are considered a feature of the city.
Buoyed by our delicious gelato treat we walked back to the tram stop near the town hall and rode back to the dock, along with one of our waiters who had shore leave to visit the city. To our surprise, given the forecast, we did not encounter any actual rain during our visit although the skies were mostly cloudy and sometimes looked threatening. We sailed away in late afternoon, as usual.
Kangaroo Island, Australia 2026
We anchored off Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island early on February 27. It’s just a handful of miles from Adelaide so no problem getting here early in the morning. Last time we were here, in 2018, we signed up for a 9 hour excursion that would take us across the island to visit some of the most prominent landmarks. But we ran into a cyclone (quite an adventure) that delayed our arrival by four hours requiring all the long excursions to be cancelled. You can see that visit (including the cyclone experience) here: https://baderjournal.com/2018/07/02/penneshaw-kangaroo-island-australia/. So we signed up for the same excursion for this visit and were able to complete the whole thing.
So we tendered into Penneshaw in the morning to meet our excursion bus and off we went. Even though our guide Robert drove pretty fast on the less than perfect roads, the long morning drive across the island through mostly forests and fields made us wonder if we had made a bad choice. One interesting thing we saw in the southwestern part of the island was fields of low green growth with taller dead white trees. This was the result of the massive forest fires here in 2020 which not only destroyed much woodland but also killed about 80 percent of the Koalas who lived there. Koalas are slow, low energy animals who live mostly in eucalyptus trees, whose leaves are most of their diet. Their natural response to danger is to climb higher into the trees but that didn’t protect them from the wildfires. A massive effort to rescue the survivors was undertaken and today the population has rebounded to between 15 and 20 thousand, maybe 40% of what it was before the fires.
Eventually we reached Flinders Chase National Park, named for Matthew Flinders who visited here in 1802 and named it Kangaroo Island. It was established as a nature reserve in 1919 and made a national park in 1972. Our first visit was to Admiral’s Arch, a natural bridge overlooking the rocky ocean shore. Getting to it requires a very long walk along a boardwalk that descends and then goes around Cape du Couedic to reach a wooden stairway up to the arch viewing platform. Very nice seaside views from the boardwalk. Less than a mile off the coast were the two Casuarina Islets.
The arch is said to have been formed by erosion from ocean waves but when we were there the ocean looked too far down for that. Maybe it was different in the past or during other seasons. The walls and top of the arch look like a cave formation, very uneven with what look like small stalactites. It was quite windy the day we were there, especially on the exposed viewing platform, which is why Rick isn’t wearing his hat in the picture below. We understand that this area is frequented by large numbers of Long Nosed Fur Seals, but on the day we visited we only saw two of them. Maybe it was the wind.
On higher ground back from the ocean stood the 82 foot tall Cape du Couedic Lighthouse. Opened in 1909, it was automated in 1957 and since 1991 the three former lighthouse keeper’s houses have been available for park visitors to rent. We saw it fairly closely from the parking lot and in the distance as we drove away.
Remarkable Rocks is the name given to a group of large granite boulders sitting near a cliff some 200 feet above the ocean. They have been sculpted naturally by wind, rain and sea spray over some 500 million years into formations that look a little like works by Henry Moore. Remarkable Rocks sounds like a remarkably English name to us, but it is quite appropriate. We parked some distance away and you had to walk on a flat boardwalk until we reached the rocks, which were on top of a low hill of granite. The orange blotches on the rocks are lichen. From inside the formation on the hill the rocks made for a stunning display.
It was time for lunch so we drove to Emu Ridge Eucalyptus Distillery, the only remaining example of what once was a thriving industry on Kangaroo Island, to eat our box lunches. The lunches were distributed in what appeared to be a lunchroom and they were quite good for box lunches.Many of us took the meal outside and sat at picnic tables set up on the grounds, some with welcome shade. It turned out that koalas hung out in the eucalyptus trees near our picnic tables. As you would expect, once spotted they drew a crowd & we were among them.
After lunch we boarded the bus once again to drive to Seal Bay, which has been a protected reserve for Australian sea lions since 1954. These sea lions are an endangered species and Seal Bay’s colony of about 800 is the third largest in the world, accounting for about 5% of the total population. When we visited there were only a few dozen at the beach beneath us (possibly more on other parts of the beach). To visit the sea lions required another long walk down a boardwalk from the visitor’s center. Visitors can only step onto the beach in the company of a park ranger, who gives a lot of information and also makes sure no one approaches the sea lions. Rick took the ranger tour on the beach while Mary stayed on a viewing platform at the top of the hill. One thing she saw that those of us on the beach did not was the skeleton of a juvenile humpback whale that washed up in this area during a storm in 1984.
On the beach we were able to walk around a bit to take pictures, but never to walk near the sea lions. The park ranger was quite good at leading the tour and explaining everything, but was careful to corral any wandering visitors. We think these were all females along with their pups, and they really weren’t doing much for the most part. But still quite fun to see.
One of the mother seals apparently climbed up one of the wooden stairways, where she stretched out on a step for a nap. But her pup followed her up there later and looked to be interested in lunch. But the mom didn’t respond so the pup went back down to the beach. This was the most activity we saw here.
It was time to head back to the tender dock in Penneshaw so we all piled back into the bus. But we made two more stops before the end. First we stopped back at the Emu Ridge facility at the request of some of the passengers. It turned out they have a lot more than just a distillery. There was a cafe and a store where we bought some honey produced by the last pure Ligurian bees in the world, who are only found on Kangaroo Island. An animal rescue operation there had several kangaroos in residence. We also spotted another koala while we were there. The second stop was at an overlook of a large bay that we think our guide Robert told us was called Baudin Beach. Just before we got there Robert gave us a stern lecture that this area was very dangerous, with an unfenced cliff that would be easy to fall over if walking through the rough sand and stones. So he admonished us not to wander beyond the road. Nevertheless, one woman (who you can see in the photo) started walking toward the cliff as soon as she exited the bus. Robert was really furious and yelled at her to come right back, which she reluctantly did.
From there it was back to Penneshaw to board the tender back to the ship. It had been an excellent day, starting out seeming like a disappointment but ending up as one of the highlights of the voyage. As the tender pulled away we saw cormorants on the rocks (they were there on our last visit too) and not to be overlooked, a sea gull.
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