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Today we arrived to Akaroa, New Zealand. Akaroa is Maori (the native language) for “long harbor”. It is the only French colonial settlement in New Zealand.
The weather threatened rain and there was a chill in the air, but we were hopeful once again to explore another harbor town in New Zealand.
The town was quaint – only 700 or so people call Akaroa home. Their population swells during the summer months due to the natural beauty in the area and a sandy beach (which is rare in volcanic areas — which is pretty much all of New Zealand!). The buildings are well preserved and there were many small shops and restaurants.
Click here for Akaroa Picture Gallery.
There is another cruise ship in port with us today, the Dawn Princess, and she carries approximately 2,000 people. So between our 650 and their 2,000 we made a pretty big impact on this small town.
We had a scheduled excursion with Regent at 1:20 PM on the Fox II, which is a sailboat that will take us around the harbor to see dolphins and possibly penguins and sea birds of different types. We decided to take the tender ride to shore early and see what else we could do in this small town.
Once on shore we walked around and found a few different types of tours offered, including a double-decker bus ride and different boat trips. We needed cash so we took a walk to find the ATM machine…which ended up taking about 25 minutes round trip. This gave us an opportunity to see the town and get a good sense of the community.
Back at the pier, I approached a cab driver and asked how much it would be to take us on a 2-hour overview tour of the area. We settled on a price and we were off.
The most remarkable thing about this small port is that 1 year ago it basically had no tourism. Hosting 2,600 people, like today, has changed a lot of lives in the area. The reason for this change is simple…the Christchurch earthquakes.
Christchurch is the 2nd largest city in New Zealand and they were hit by two major earthquakes in a six-month time frame. The first, in September 2010, by a magnitude 7.1 and then the knock-out punch came in February 2011 when a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit them again. Because the city had been significantly undermined by the first quake, the 2nd ended up killing 185 people and inevitably crippled the downtown area. So much so that cruise ships no longer visit the port of Lyttelton, which is just outside of Christchurch.
So now, cruise ships visit the Akaroa port instead. There are tours that will take you to Christchurch…but our cruise director advised against it. Instead we opted for a tour of this area and were driven around some spectacular vistas of the Akaroa harbor area.
Back at port, we watched the Fox II sailboat as it pulled up with another Regent group that had gone out earlier…they looked cold. The temperature had dropped to the mid-50s and it was still threatening rain. We opted to pass on the sailboat ride and instead took the tender back to the ship. We did hear that the sailboat ride was fun. People saw lots of dolphins swimming at the bow of the boat, and all in all had a good time.
Photography Comments:
Another gray day made for challenging picture taking. I’m sure this area is spectacular with some sunlight as the golden and green hills give way to crystal blue water all the way to the harbor exit. But, today the cloud cover required stopping down a bit to keep the clouds from blowing out. We missed out on the sheep dog training tour but I’ll get some pictures from Sherrie soon and add them. On our drive-about with Doug the cab driver we had chances to get some nice harbor views and on our walk into town I got a few people shots. There are more where those came from but no time to grab them. I used the D700 with 28-300 for most of the shots and the S95 for the shots of M and me taken by someone else. Here are some of the best of the lot.
Trip Summary » Travel with Dale & Margaret - […] Akaroa, New Zealand […]