Travel
As the weather made history for all the wrong reasons, I was plotting my escape. A time machine back to 2019, before everything started going downhill, seemed like a logical choice. But a jaunt across the Tasman onboard Princess Cruises’ Majestic Princess, was a slightly more realistic if not infinitely more luxurious way to cure my pandemic hangover.
My voyage from Dunedin to Sydney via Hobart began in a minibus. Around the Otago Harbour and over the Peninsula, we passed Papanui Inlet – dotted with black swans, royal spoonbills and pied stilt fossicking through the shallows – traversing the windswept shoreline to Nature’s Wonders at Taiaroa Head for a shore excursion.
Here I met salt-of-the-earth owner Perry Reid, who bundled me into an amphibious eight-wheel Argo for a wildlife adventure touring the natural habitats of blue and yellow-eyed penguins, plus New Zealand fur seals. It’s rough and wild, and that’s part of its appeal. Proudly nodding
