Tahiti–there we went

I thought I’d be clever, and make this a play on words, rather than ‘here we come’ it was ‘there we went’ (because we’ve already been). Or should it be ‘there we go’. But seriously, when you have to spell out the punchline you already know the words don’t work.

That was a longer blog silence than I planned. We’re travelling at present and I am still getting used to setting up a viable internet service. We’re cruising right now–one long trans-Pacfic trip with just a few port days. We started in Honolulu.

Waikiki is a beautiful beach. Weatherwise, it was hot and felt more akin to Cairns than Brisbane, which, when I look at the map, I suppose it is.

We arrived at 6am, spent the day wandering around like zombies because neither of us slept on the plane and the next day got on the ship. Poor planning on our behalf, because we didn’t get time to see much. Next time we’ll take a couple of days as there were places we wanted to go but didn’t have enough time.

Internet prices on the ship were USD$20 per day. Given the exchange rate that comes out to AUD$30+ per day. Call me stingy, but I wasn’t prepared to pay that much. Especially not when I had international roaming on my phone which is only $5 per day (AUD). I decided to wait the week until French Polynesia.

Roaming worked in all three ports there but I couldn’t connect my laptop to the phone. I’ve never had any trouble doing that before. I though about buying a day’s worth of internet, but the ship didn’t look as if it sold that, only sold a package that lasted the rest of the cruise.

The photo above is the view from my ship balcony of Papeete, Tahiti, our last port in French Polynesia. All ports were tropical islands, all beautiful.

We spent another week at sea, including an extra day because we couldn’t get into Auckland because of the weather. (That’s cruising for you. Always expect the unexpected.) We finally arrived in Wellington. I had roaming. And internet. Yay. And then I mucked up the password and had to wait twenty-four hours for a reset, and by then we’re sailing again.

Clearly, I need to get my technical issues in order. Otherwise bite the bullet and start paying for shipboard internet access.

At least the writing is still going well.