31. Towel Creatures

Friday, 23 NOV 2012

Every evening our cabin steward leaves a towel creature on our bed. Here is a selection.

 

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30. The Last Day of the Cruise

Friday, 23 NOV 2012

Yesterday afternoon we left Hobart, Tasmania bound for Sydney. Today we are at sea all day and arrive in Sydney early Saturday morning and disembark the MS Volendam. Yesterday evening they served us a traditional American turkey and dressing Thanksgiving dinner, complete with pumpkin pie. The dinner was excellent, but for pumpkin pie I will stick with the excellent traditional recipe on the large Libby can of pumpkin.

Today all of the disembarking passengers (the others are continuing on to Singapore, Hong Kong, and other horribly hot humid places) gathered in the main theater for detailed instructions on final procedures. Our very talented cruise director Ms. Tamryn Hurly gave us her list of the top ten funniest questions she and other staff have been asked.

On a recent Alaskan cruise they had a park ranger on board to give commentary as they sailed amongst the glaciers. He was explaining that the glaciers look blue because they absorb every color but blue. A lady asked, "Excuse me sir. What color is Butt Blue?" He smoothly replied that it is the color of your butt if you sit on a glacier.

There was a gentleman standing on the landing of the staircase, looking confused. He asked, "Do these stairs go up or down?"

"What do you do with the ice carvings after they melt?"

"Is the water in the toilet salt or fresh?" Tam replied that she didn't know, and she didn't really want to know, for two reasons: number one and number two!

A lady stopped by the spa and asked, "How small does my face have to be for the 'mini facial' special?"

An elderly American couple were out on the open deck one night looking up at the stars, and the lady was overheard asking her husband, "Honey, do you think that's the same moon we see back home?"

A lady asked the photo manager, "How do I know which photos are mine?" Uhhh, they would be the ones with your face in them.

Tam was standing on the pier in Brisbain welcoming guests off the ship and guiding them to their shore excursion departure points. A lady asked, "Excuse me. Where is the bus for the walking tour?"

Do the crew sleep on board?

 

At the end they marshaled practically the entire crew, staff, officers, and cast onstage for a grand finale.

 

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29. Hobart, Tasmania

Wednesday-Thursday, 21-22 NOV 2012

Departing Burnie, we sailed east and then south along the eastern side of Tasmania, then back west to Hobart, which is on the southeast side of Tasmania at latitude 42.9 S, essentially the same latitude south as Lansing, MI is north, and thus close to the same latitude as our hometown of Midland, MI. That's also about the same latitude as Christchurch, New Zealand.

Just to the east of Hobart we passed Cape Raoul, a pointe on the Tasman Peninsula, with its spectacular cliffs of columnar dolerite. Time for a geology lesson. Magma cools to form characteristic polygonal columns, mostly hexagons and pentagons, a hundred feet long or more, when it is injected underground at relatively shallow depths, as in a sill or dike or plug. This formation is thus intrusive, not extrusive - - i.e. it's not volcanic. Dolerite has the same composition as basalt (the kind of lava in Hawai'i, in the mid-ocean ridge and the deep seafloor) and a medium-size crystal grain. The size of the component mineral crystals is larger than in extrusive (volcanic) basalt because it cooled more slowly, remaining covered by layers of earlier rocks into which it intruded. The crystals are smaller than gabbro or granite because the intruded magma cooled more quickly than a deep batholith that is typically injected several kilometers below the surface. As the magma cools it shrinks and breaks up into polygonal patterns the same way as red clay mud flats do in the sun.

Here's the famous bridge across the Derwent river. It's famous partly because in the '70s a large ore boat rammed into a couple of the supports toward one end, collapsing a section of the bridge, sinking the ship, and dumping a few hapless automobiles in the river, killing a few people both on the ship and on the bridge. It also isolated one side of the city (the side with the airport) from the other side (the business district) for two years. A local manufacturer of small ferry boats responded immediately and innovatively to meet the sudden need, and is now the world's leading manufacturer of large catamaran ferry boats.

Of course we visited the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens.

All we need is some cheese to go with this, and we can have cheese and quackers:

We took a long coach ride up to the top of Mt Wellington, where we encountered spectacular views, Chinese tourists, cold howling winds, and a dusting of snow.

The next day we took another long coach ride to the Tahune Forest Air Walk, an extensive elevated walkway through the canopy of a temperate rainforest. It was raining most of the time, so our photography was limited.

They are walking through the tree!

Over the Huon River:

 

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28. Burnie, Tasmania

Tuesday, 20 NOV 2012

Burnie is a small commercial port on the north side of the island state of Tasmania. The capital, Hobart, is all the way around on the south side. We had made a port call in Burnie on our previous cruise to New Zealand and found it to be interesting and charming. This was formerly an important paper manufacturing center, but now they just ship wood chips to Asia for paper factories.

I took an excursion to Wing's wildlife park. This is a family-owned enterprise by a farm family which decided to dedicate one of their seven farms to restoring injured or orphaned wildlife.

They have tame kangaroos

Note the joey in the pouch. This baby is just about to outgrow its cushy home and be ejected by Mom.

Cute koala:

The black swan:

This wildlife farm is in the Gunn's Plains, the valley of the Leven river.

 

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27. Melbourne

Monday, 19 NOV 2012

The skyline of Melbourne city center from the deck of the MS Volendam at dock. The ship in the photo is the ferry Spirit of Tasmania, which we will ride from Melbourne to Devonport, Tasmania, in early January when we come back this way.

We took an excursion up into the Dandenong Mountains (hills!) northeast of the city. This is a view from a hilltop restaurant/visitors center.

The distant skyline of Melbourne:

This establishment had a very nice English Garden. This day it was featuring some xxx-rated entertainment. There were several couples in the garden shamelessly "going at it" right out there in public. I don't mean to endorse pornography, but here is nature in the raw!

{ In case the blogmaster censors this part, above are two photos of bugs copulating. }

Here are a couple of the beautiful flowers in the garden:

 

Here is some of the more interesting statuary in the garden.

Farewell, Melbourne.

 

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26. Kangaroo Island

Saturday, 17 NOV 2012

Entry onto Kangaroo Island is at Penneshaw by anchoring in the harbor and taking the lifeboats into the pier. There are many attractions on the island, mostly natural. It is evidently the last refuge in the world for honeybees that are completely free of the mites and associated disease agents that are blighting the global bee population. It also has the last Australian family-run eucalyptus oil operation run by traditional (rather than large-scale factory) methods - sort of like a West Virginia or Kentucky hills moonshine still, except that it's legal.

We took an excursion to Seal Bay wildlife preserve. Seal Bay is a misnomer - they are actually sea lions in this particular area, although there are some New Zealand fur seals also on KI.

And here is the most interesting creature on the beach:

 

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