Sail Away and Tauranga

The Mercury is a nice little ship. In addition to our stateroom (with its own window, woo hoo!), we enjoyed the main dining room (Manhattan), the forward observation bar (Navigator), and the Celebrity Theatre, which was large and well-appointed.

Sailing away from Auckland was very pleasant, great weather plus we quickly spied a couple of other guys we figured were probably fellow members of our Pied Piper group and within half an hour there were close to a dozen of us occupying the prime real estate (overlooking the pool with a good view of the front, too) that I dubbed “The Boys’ Nest.” This was only my second Pied Piper cruise (Naoyuki’s third, I think) and with just 65-70 guys much smaller than the last one we’d been on (with nearly 400 of us on our post-Thanksgiving 2005 Caribbean cruise.)

After the sail away we gathered in Mercury’s Pavillion Night Club to meet our Pied Piper hosts, Michael and Paul, two brothers who are gay and from Sydney and now living overseas (Boston and London, respectively.) They turned out to be great hosts!

The next morning we woke to find ourselves in Tauranga, about 100 miles SE of Auckland on the Bay of Plenty. A former dairy / manufacturing town, Tauranga these days earns its living mostly from tourism, both as a beach town and more recently a cruise ship port. It’s just a hop and a skip from NZ’s main kiwifruit growing country (last year’s output was a staggering 3 billion pieces of kiwifruit!) and about an hour away from Rotorua, a center of Maori culture.

We did a bus tour of the port / beach area (Mount Maunganui) and the town, plus a trek out to Kiwi Fruit Country (or Kiwi 360, I’m not sure which) and then a visit to the Elms, the original missionary station (dating back to the 1840s) in the Tauranga area. Our guide on the Kiwi Fruit tour is one of the biggest owner / producers in the area and he was VERY knowledgeable. I told him afterwards that his was far and away the best agricultural tour I’ve ever been on (and over the years I’ve been on several, thanks to one junket or another.)

The Elms was a nice little place. Our tour guide was wearing the sort of dress that a woman her age would have worn at the time the place was founded. Otherwise, not terrifically memorable, although the collection of Norfolk pines (many of them 150 years old or more) was impressive.

The tour took us back to the ship and then we had to decide what we wanted to do, hang out OR go back into the town (which we hadn’t seen that much of.) Celebrity was running shuttle buses but the price was US $8 one way per person! We went to the Mount (as Mount Maunganui is known locally) and visited the local i-Site (New Zealand Visitor Information Center) to find out that the local bus company runs on the half hour from the Mount to the CBD for NZ$2.50 (about US$2) per person each way.

Too good a deal to pass up, in other words, and plenty of local color along the way. Turns out we could have taken an express bus but we went the long route going and coming, which meant we went through all the local neighborhoods, saw all the little old ladies and little old men and teenage boys and girls (January is their summer break) back and forth to the mall and other shopping areas, and so forth.

In the CBD we checked out the shops (and found a really cute papier-mâché girl fairy to add to my collection) and visited the Tauranga Art Gallery (Toi Tauranga), which was probably more interesting architecturally than as an art collection per se.

Touring Tauranga added to the sense we’d gotten in Auckland (and that stayed with us throughout our time in New Zealand), that we were in a very safe, very comfortable, very middle-class country, with great public infrastructure (public transportation, parks, civic amenities), very well-educated and extremely comfortable. That assessment would be borne out during each of our successive ports of call.