By Anne W. Semmes
This is not exactly a thank you letter to my astronomer stepbrother who invited me to his home in New Zealand for a week and then a two-week cruise around New Zealand.
So, the first week we were enjoying a cocktail before dinner in his fine townhouse with fern-filled garden in the village of Sumner outside of Christchurch, located on the South Island. It was a fine red wine from a New Zealand winery, one of many in that country, when the house began to shake. The whole world felt like it was shaking. “We’re having an earthquake,” he calmly confirmed. A block from his house I had seen a massive cliff that in the dreadful 2011 earthquake had split off a sizeable boulder that fell upon a house. The inhabitants are still in that house – for eternity.
On a trip in to Christchurch I saw the great Christ Church Cathedral still abuilding from its massive 2011 earthquake damage. Many downtown buildings were tumbled, and now buildings can be built only four stories high.
He took me to friends’ houses perched high up on the hills. One can only imagine what would happen to them with the next serious earthquake. At one house I met a distant relative of
Ernest Shackleton who surely was affected by the natural world. A powerful color landscape photograph of Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica graced one wall. My astronomer stepbrother shared knowledge of the Shackleton Crater on the moon where, “The Artemis 4, 5, and 6 will be building a substantial base there at the south pole of the moon” where “the temperature is incredibly cold.”
At a dinner party my stepbrother threw for me I met the New Zealanders who had traveled with him on a trip to Papua New Zealand on the same ship we would be boarding in a few days. These were the first adventurers I would meet on our 14-day Heritage Adventure trip around the two islands of New Zealand that I learned has as much landscape as Great Britain.
The challenges of adventure travel began aboard the Heritage Adventurer ship the day we cruised into Fiordland on the southwestern coast of the South Island. There are 14 Sounds in Fiordland and we visited Dusky Sound, so named by another adventurer British Captain James Cook who first arrived there in March of 1770 on a dusky day.
And there in Dusky Sound I learned what adventurers do. They climb down from their ship with backpack and life jacket into small dinghies called zodiacs that whisk furiously over the water to land where the adventurers land in their gumboots, change to walking shoes, and begin their climb up hills and mountains full of wonder for the wild green world where no predators live, no squirrels, rats, and hardly any birds, except for the Bell bird.
So, ladies and gentlemen travelers, this is a typical day for adventurers I learned. And on the exemplary Heritage Adventurer a day goes like this on the cruise. After breakfast, by nine it’s time to climb down into the zodiac, to climb or walk, then climb back up for lunch, then climb down for an afternoon adventure, then back up for cocktails and a review of the day from one of the scholarly crew, then dinner, then perhaps a talk prepping for an upcoming adventure and then bedtime.
That’s when I discovered the Pacific blues – with those rolling waves that roll under your bed, back and forth, as you roll across your bed. Yes, when they come, you’ve been carefully navigating down the halls of the ship, to keep from falling. But rolling in bed is a more serious matter. Have you tried to sleep rolling like a pinball in bed?
But morning comes and help abounds. There are only 33 guests on this ship that takes 140, but 88 crew surround you. They are there for your every move. Mealtimes particularly. The meals are all four courses and delicious, and this doesn’t help the climbing down and up. But what is laid out for you or on order from the menu in the dining room is hard to turn down.
And then my left foot rebels by blowing up like a balloon, making it hard to get that walking shoe on. The Chinese doctor on board is perplexed by what has caused the swelling. He gives me water pills to take. It stays swollen until I’m home and has slowly un-swelled.
But I continued to climb on the cruise though maybe once a day. I didn’t miss visiting the Royal Albatross colony or seeing the Polynesian wonders in the Wellington Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, nor seeing the sperm whale blow from his spout, or the dolphins racing along with the ship. And then it was time to fly home.
Air New Zealand took off in the evening for the nonstop flight to JFK. And it was turbulent the whole way home! There I was in my narrow bed in gifted business class holding on
for dear life while all around me people slept. “Have they taken sleeping pills?” I asked the steward. He replied with stories of passengers sleeping for 10 hours at a time. So, they missed seeing the full moon as I saw, and the sunrise and sunset at other times.
So, at JFK after landing safely, I approached the Captain of my airship why all that turbulence? And I had watched on my screen how high he tried to fly above that turbulence, up to 41,000 feet. He replied, “I couldn’t fly any higher than 41,000 feet, and its flying over the United States where there’s more turbulence. You’ve had a lot of storms here.”
But sorry Captain, I felt it as we flew over Tahiti, and that long stretch of the Pacific before we arrived at Mexico and Texas, and on up the southern states to New York, all those nearly 9.000 miles.
But I left behind an astonishingly beautiful country. It would take a book to tell what all I learned about the flora and fauna, and the very first arriving Māori people. New Zealand is full of history, green trees and green meadows full of sheep, lovely blue waters, and streets with all the telephone wires underground, and friendly people who dress down and love the outdoor life and talk with that funny sound of eees. Yes, it’s time to write that thank you note to my stepbrother who loves where he lives so much, he says he will never travel again.
