New Zealand, Tahiti, Moorea, Honolulu
New Zealand, Tahiti, Moorea, Hawaii
April 2026
We left home on March 24 and returned on May 2. The first part of our trip is documented in an Australia write-up. We flew into Brisbane and boarded the Royal Caribbean Voyager of the Seas on March 28. Then on April 6, we flew to Sydney and boarded the Discovery Princess for a 26 day cruise home thru New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, ending in Los Angeles. I have written that the longer the cruise, the older the passengers. When a cruise exceeds 20 days, the ship is basically a floating rest home. Most of the passengers on the Discovery have been around since the Roosevelt administration. Teddy’s. There have been nine medical emergencies during this cruise. Six were announcements instructing the Medical Response Team to specific locations on board. I observed two instances of ambulances pulling up to the gangway at different times while at port in Tahiti. Finally, there was an announcement one evening requesting anyone with type A blood and a donor card to proceed to the medical bay as a transfusion was needed. I don’t know if there were any subsequent burials at sea, but I assume the captain would not announce those.
Aboard the Discovery Princess, we set sail to New Zealand, Tahiti, Moorea, Honolulu, and LA. But, and I cannot lie, this is a BIG BUT sir, we were barely underway when the captain announced that Cyclone Vaianu was developing to the northeast and was headed straight for New Zealand. As it progressed, our stops in New Zealand may be altered. For those of you residing in the northern hemisphere, a cyclone is what a hurricane is called south of the equator. Not related to this trip, but information that could help you win on Jeopardy one day, a typhoon is a hurricane in the western Pacific.
New Zealand was first settled by the Maori, a Polynesian people around 1250. They called the land Aotearoa, because Pulmonary was already taken. Aotearoa translates to “Land of the Long White Cloud”. The Maori language is obviously a lot more efficient than English. A Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, showed up in 1642 and called the islands Staten Landt, or Staten Island in English. No that’s not right; the actual translation was much dumber than that – “States Land” because he thought it connected to South America. Obviously he did not understand that if he could sail all the way around the land, it wasn’t connected to South America. The Dutch cartographers drawing up the maps renamed it Nieuw Zeeland. Finally the English showed up and during a hard fought afternoon tea (referred to as the battle of Earl Grey versus Oolong) revised the name to New Zealand. On a side note, Tasman did have an island he discovered eventually named after him over 200 years later – Tasmania. And by default, the Tasmanian devil, that dimwitted blight of Bugs Bunny, was also named after him. I hope he’s proud in the afterlife!
The ship had destinations seminars on days at sea. These provide information about the upcoming ports, local customs, and things to see or do. The presenter was British and didn’t speak English, only British. She kept saying that in New Zealand we needed to see the geezers. Dang! I see more geezers every morning at the buffet than I ever want to see in a lifetime! Finally she started showing photos of the hot springs…and geysers! Unfortunately, no one on this cruise got to see any geysers. Our three stops in New Zealand were changed to the same Auckland stop twice due to the cyclone and also for corporate commercial purposes. We were scheduled to drop off about 300 passengers and pick up 300 new passengers on April 12 in Auckland. But the cyclone was rudely scheduled to also arrive in Auckland on April 12 and the port was closed. So we were in port in Auckland on April 11, the day we were supposed to be in Tauranga, New Zealand. For a grand total of four hours (8:00 am – 12:00 pm) so the departing passengers can get off and still make their flights on April 12. But since we were early, the arriving passengers weren’t in position to board yet. So we anchored just outside of Auckland to ride out Vaianu using a couple of islands to shield the ship from the larger waves with plans to return on April 13 to pick up the new passengers, the day we were scheduled to be at the Bay of Islands. While the ship rocked quite a bit during the passing of the cyclone, the eye passed about 10 miles east and it wasn’t all that bad. About 1,600 New Zealand homes lost power as a result. As someone who lives in Houston and is served by CenterPoint Energy, that is a fraction of our outages on a perfect spring day.
We could see the skyline of Auckland from our anchorage when the rain and haze let up, and weren’t due back into Auckland until 8:00 am the next morning I thought we’d just sit in our cove and wait since the storm has passed, right? Wrong! Once the eye of Vaianu was safely past, the Captain announced we are headed out to sea. In the open ocean the cyclone was moving away but still close enough that the ship rocked considerably more than when we were protected in the bay. However, we had to get into international waters as quickly as possible because then and only then could the casino and the duty free shops open. The ship had been leaking profits all over the protected bay.
Let me stop here and paint a picture for the readers about our, or as my bride would humorously call it, “my” luck. Out of our last five cruises in the last nine months, including this one, we have now had seven ports cancelled:
Greenland cruise in July cancelled a scenic trip through Prins Christian Sund in lieu of open Atlantic due to high winds (Not technically a port, but I am counting it since this was our opportunity to see puffins, seals, and other wildlife)
Panama Canal cruise in October cancelled stops in Cabo San Lucas and Mazatlan, Mexico and had to zig-zag through the eastern Pacific to avoid three named storms – Hurricanes Octave and Priscilla and tropical storm Raymond
Antarctica cruise in January cancelled a port in the Falkland Islands due to gale force winds
Vanuatu cruise in March had a stop at Mystery Island cancelled due to high winds
And although we made this stop, Luganville, Vanuatu had a 7.4 earthquake, the strongest in about 10 years, just a couple of hours before our arrival that delayed us going ashore and limited activities due to no utilities on the island.
This cruise – cancelled Tauranga and Bay of Islands stops in New Zealand due to Cyclone Vaianu.
I think a pattern has been sufficiently established here. My bride pointed out it is me that is the problem because at least two civil wars (Yemen and Ivory Coast) followed my past visits by six months and by two weeks, respectively. Also the Jakarta JW Marriott was blown up twice by terrorists after my visits; the first time three months after in 2003, the second, six days after in 2007. As a result, I am issuing an offer to the countries of the world: Pay me $100 per month and I WON’T visit your country. Who in their right mind wouldn’t pay $100 per month to avoid a hurricane, cyclone, earthquake, civil war, or terrorist attack? I’ll even make it easier – in lieu of $100/month you can pay $1000/year or $10,000/12 years. Think of it as an offer you can’t refuse. The USA is not eligible for this offer, but a few states that don’t interest me may qualify.
It was disappointing to not see more of New Zealand than Auckland. Auckland is a very nice and clean city, but it is a city. I was looking forward to hikes and beaches associated with the two cancelled ports. One thing I did learn about New Zealand’s weather site. You can get forecasts and current conditions including Airbourne Allergen Forecast (pollen count), UV Risk, and Laundry Drying Time. During the cloudy, humid time leading up to the cyclone, laundry drying times approached six hours and the governor declared a laundry emergency. But thankfully by the time we left, drying time was down to only two hours, so the city’s dirty laundry was able to recover from the damaging and humid cyclone. If you visit Auckland in the future, or if you just want to know the drying time for laundry in Auckland, you can reference this site: https://www.metservice.com/towns-cities/regions/auckland/locations/auckland/7-days
There are a lot of sea days on the voyage home. A total of 18 days out of 26 total are days at sea. The ship puts on a lot of seminars/presentations. Those I actually enjoy. Stupid games, karaoke, shows with only singing and/or dancing, music always playing or being performed loudly, drinking, and gambling in the casino are intolerable to me. So one scheduled “enlightenment” presentation was on coffee. I like good coffee to the point of addiction, so I made sure to attend. I knew a lot of this, but it was informative to hear it all at once and organized in historical order, abbreviated here for the benefit of the readers:
1. About 1000 years ago, coffee berries with beans inside were consumed by goats in Ethiopia which then exhibited hyper-active behavior. Goat herders tried to get a buzz as a result. Yes, that is exactly the logical thing to do if you see an animal eat something foreign and then act very strange. Eat some yourself.
2. About 500 years ago in Yemen, someone crushed some of the beans inside the red coffee berries, basically attempting to brew tea with coffee beans, and coffee was first consumed as a drink.
3. Current time: nearly every major city in the world enacts laws requiring Starbucks or a competitor coffee shop be located on every street corner, gas station, church, and elementary school and grossly overcharge for bad coffee.
4. Someone in Indonesia didn’t have immediate access to coffee and was having severe caffeine withdrawals. They didn’t have nuclear weapons to blow up the country next door and get that country’s coffee so they became very resourceful. They noted that a wild animal, the civet cat, had been eating wild coffee berries, and the beans inside the berries were passing through the civet cat’s digestive system undigested. So they picked the beans out of the poop and made coffee. Now they sell this poop coffee for $50-$100 a cup. They decided this was much more effective than nuclear weapons on the other countries of the world.
The civet cat poop coffee, called Kopi Luwak, is real. It has been so successful in Indonesia that in Thailand, they started hiding coffee beans in elephant food, then picking the beans out of the elephant poop for coffee. This coffee is called Black Ivory and sells for almost as much as the Kopi Luwak. None of this is made up. I have 25 longhorn cattle on my ranch. Being an entrepreneur type, I have decided to start feeding them coffee beans. I already have a name for the final product: Cowffee! Give me a few weeks to work out the details, then stop by for cup!
Tahiti was a nice stop. We joined a group for a guided drive around the island. One Asian man in our group was appointed to ask stupid questions to the driver on behalf the entire continent of Asia. “Why are the roofs metal? Why aren’t there more solar panels? What do they teach in the schools? What kind of fruit do the people eat?” When the driver pointed out the bay where the ship the Bounty had anchored 300 years ago, he asked us if we had ever seen the movie The Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlin Brando. That raised 50-100 more questions. “What is the Bounty? What is The Mutiny on the Bounty? Who is Marlin Brando? Why did he make a movie? Is it a real story?...” I thought we should mutiny the question-asker out of the van. The next stop was Moorea Island, just a short distance away from Tahiti. It is less populated and has some great hiking trails, but no port; the ship shuttled everyone to shore in tenders. Tenders are small boats that Elvis sang that he loved. Once ashore, I hiked to the top of Magic Mountain. This is a real mountain and not an amusement park in Los Angeles. Actually, instead of hiked, “trudged” or “crawled” to the top may be more accurate. It was a grueling climb. As I started back down, a group of four-wheelers shot past me taking my route up. A group of four-wheelers is known as a “cheat.”
Honolulu was the last port before our final leg into LA. We were warned that the entire ship had to clear immigration and it could take 4-5 hours, not expected to be completed until sometime after 11:00. We had reservations at 10:30 into the Pearl Harbor Memorial about a 30 minute Uber drive away. At 7:30 when the first announcement was made that immigration was open and we could debark, we ran down ten flights of stairs. (Elevators are only available on a cruise ship when you don’t need them.) We cleared immigration in about three minutes, most of the time serpentining thru the empty ribbon-queued lines. The fastest I have cleared immigration in an estimated 300-400 times in any country in the world!
Pearl Harbor is a must-see for anyone traveling to Honolulu. It is a sad reminder of what can happen to suddenly change everything and the tremendous loss of life that can occur to those sworn to protect us. I really enjoyed going thru the submarine, the USS Bowfin. Over 30 years ago, while working in Mobile, Alabama, I toured the USS Drum submarine. If you have never been in a submarine of the WWII vintage, you really should see the cramped quarters these submariners lived in for weeks and months. There is a memorial with a headstone for each of the 52 submarines lost in WWII. The memorial sitting over the sunk battleship, the USS Arizona, is moving, and seeing the plaques for the other ships damaged or sunk and reading thru the 3,500 deaths on December 6, 1941 is something to remind you that freedom isn’t free and others paid with their lives for what we enjoy and take for granted each day.
So, to sum all this up: if you have an opportunity to visit New Zealand, Tahiti, Moorea, or Hawaii, by all means do so! Make an opportunity! But if it is on a ship for 26 days with 4,000 geezers, you might want to declare a medical emergency instead…
Safe sailing. Thru all the cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons!
Keith