Seas the day!

Fancy a cruise? Passengers get the royal treatment sailing from Dunedin to Sydney

- ANNA LEE

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 on board 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 to Penguin Beach, Perry explained that he, his wife Tracey and their son Martin are preserving the local environment for future generations to enjoy. For this reason, the family declared the beach home to some of the world’s rarest penguins a human-free zone around 20 years ago.

Moments later, the Argo sputtered to a halt as seal pups stumbled over a hill and into a rock-pool nursery.

“Nature has that way of connecting people again,” Perry mused. You get a real understanding of just how precious life is.”