The ‘Prom’ has had a series of disasters over recent years. In 2009, most of the park was burnt in a very extensive bushfire and masses of grey skeletons of trees are very obvious around the landscape. Our visit was just two years after the second disaster. In March 2011, over 370 mm (nearly 15 inches) of rain fell in 24 hours. The caused extensive flood damage, with the road being closed for some time and the park being closed to visitors fro some months. One of the main walking tracks to Sealers Cove has still not reopened.

We could see considerable evidence of rain and water damage. There were many eroded gullies, but the one that stood out was this enormous slip on the side of Mt Bishop. Obviously, mud and boulders sluiced their way down the hillside leaving this enormous scar. 

We were unable to do any walking in the Southern part of the Prom as this area was closed due to a controlled burn taking place. However, we had a great time exploring the eastern coastline along Squeaky Beach, Whisky Bay and Picnic Bay. On another day, we walked out to Tongue Point. leaving from the Darby Saddle car park and finishing at Darby River where the re-opened road bridge crosses Darby River. On our last day, we had begun to walk up to Mt Oberon, but retreated back to the car after a kilometre or so when a cold front came through bringing rain that fell for the rest of the day. By then the view would have been hidden by cloud anyway.

These photos show some of the very scenic coastline along the eastern side of the Promontory.

I have developed a fairly routine order for the day. It begins by attending a local dawn service at the Doncaster sub branch of the RSL. Here, I meet up with my oldest mate, Ken Wriedt, and a few other Vietnam Veterans. Ten years ago, only about fifty people attended this service but now over 400 people are up early in the morning at dawn to attend.

Breakfast is on the way home at a little cafe that opens early. Here I get a friendly welcome from the owner as he makes coffee and catch up with another friend, Paul McCrowan. Paul served in 6RAR and at one time taught our kids at Primary School.

Back home, I am able to watch the first part of the march on TV before Ken picks me up to go into the city to join my unit, 85 Transport Platoon. We generally march off by about 11.30 am towards the Shrine of Remembrance where the official ceremony is held. Before us, representatives of units from WW1, WW2 and Korea will have marched.  It never ceases to amaze me  that even though there are no veterans from WW1 still alive, and few from WW2, that it still takes over 2 1/2 hours after the march starts before we begin. I just managed to get my head on TV as I carried our banner past the cameras.

This year, Jill, Cathy and the girls came to watch and cheer us on and then joined us old diggers for lunch. It was very nice to have them along.

In earlier years, a few of us would have soldiered on for an afternoon beer at one of the pubs, or dropped in to another venue to see if any other old mates were there to catch up with, but age has now decided that a good lunch is enough celebration for us in one day, so it was back home after a good day and an early night.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

We stayed in the little town of Martinborough (about 90 minutes drive from Wellington) for two nights at this very nice boutique hotel. Martinborough is the centre of the wine growing area in the Wairarapa district and is noted for its Pinot Noir. I find that NZ wines are quite expensive. Some of the wines that we tasted at the cellar door sold for over $NZ45 per bottle. (about $A36). They were nice wines, but their price is a reflection of the fact that the wineries there are very small in size and cannot achieve the economies of scale that larger business in other countries would be able to achieve.

On a drive down to a nearby beach, we came across this old shearing shed. It has certainly seen better days, but it reflects the long agricultural history of New Zealand and the importance of sheep in its economy.

This lighthouse at Cape Palliser, has been automated since 1996. It provides a great lookout along the coast and climbing the 250 steps to the top is no mean feat. Originally, the lighthouse keepers had to navigate a slippery track around the rocks and up the cliff face.

In a little nearby cove, we found dozens of New Zealand Fur Seals. They were very active, and many of the young ones were frolicking in the water. It reminded me of my recent trip to South Georgia, where we saw similar seals on nearly every beach, headland and bay that we visited.

Near Cape Palliiser is this little fishing village where the locals launch their boats across the beach from boat trailers using old crawler tractors.

At a place named Lake Ferry is a pub with a wide veranda that overlooks Lake Onoke. Traditionally the publican was required to offer a ferry service across the lake, but that seems not to be the case any more. It is a typical NZ grazing district.

Wellington, with a population of about 210,000m people is a very nice little city. This street, Lambton Quay, used to be the original shoreline of the harbour and is the main shopping area in downtown Wellington.

North of Wellington is the town of Waikanai. People living their seem very fond of their gardens as most of the ones that we saw were very well kept. This is the town beach which provides a safe place to swim..

Further north, is the little town with the simple name of ‘Bulls’. The town is named after James Bull, who founded the town and owned the first general store there. Nearby, we came across this rather run down milking shed. The local joke is that none of the shops in the town sell milk as ‘you can’t get milk from bulls’.

I have also gone back and added some other pictures to each of the original posts from my trip. The communication system on the ship was limited to text messages only, so I was unable to include any photos that illustrate this very scenic part of the world. You can see all my original posts from my trip at this location here. If you go back far enough, you will even come across the gallery that I created from photos on my first trip to the Antarctic Peninsular in 2006.

I hope you enjoy looking at some of my favourite scenes from my trip. (Click on any of the thumbnails to see the larger photo. You can then scroll backwards or forwards by clicking on the left, or right hand side of each photo respectively)

1. USHUAIA

2. FALKLAND ISLANDS

3. SOUTH GEORGIA

Part One

Part Two

4. ANTARCTICA

Flying increases flatulence, according to an article published Friday in the peer-reviewed New Zealand Medical Journal, and passengers should release the gas — or risk painful medical consequences.

Lead author Dr. Jacob Rosenberg, professor of surgery at the University of Copenhagen, said he always wondered why he had more flatulence flying than when on the ground. Then, after a recent trip, he opened his bag and noticed a water bottle “almost smashed by the change in ambient pressure,” said Rosenberg. “And then I thought of the mechanisms of increased bowel air volume when flying.”

It’s simple. When altitude increases, pressure decreases. According to the thermodynamic principal known as the “ideal gas law,” as pressure drops, volume increases. While cabins are pressurized to compensate, the mechanisms can only do so much. When the plane is at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, inside it’s still the equivalent of 8,000 feet above sea level. That’s a lot of physics bearing down on your intestines.

There’s a clear medical rationale for releasing the gas. Holding back flatulence can lead to “discomfort and even pain, bloating, dyspepsia and pyrosis,” according to the article, titled “Flatulence on Airplanes: Just Let it Go,” which surveyed previously published research and studies. It also notes that holding back flatulence has been suggested as a major risk factor for diverticular disease, a condition where pouches develop in the wall of the colon.

But just try telling that to your seatmate.

Instead, Peter Post, a director at Emily Post institute and author of “Essential Manners for Men,” recommends that travelers “hold it in until they have the opportunity to get up and release the gas in the restroom.”

If you can’t get to the lavatory in time, for instance, if there’s turbulence and the fasten seat belt light is on, “be as discreet as possible” and release the gas, said Post. “People understand the situation and let it go.”

Unfortunately, no graceful phrase or gesture exists to completely smooth over the social awkwardness of releasing your personal flatulence inside a confined space where 50 percent of the air is recirculated. An “excuse me” can really only go so far. It can even draw its own unwanted attention.

“Almost anything you say can create embarrassment and make the situation more difficult,” said Post. “Your best bet is to keep your mouth shut.”

The article’s authors suggested airlines install seats embedded with active charcoal, which can absorb intestinal gases. Carriers could also pass out blankets with the odor-absorbing compound sewn in.

Travelers could also be subjected to a methane breath screening and those with higher methane content could be assigned seats in a restricted area of the plane near the lavatory. Another proposed solution involved the use of rubber pants with air containers to collect passed gas.

As for passengers, they could wear underwear lined with active charcoal, the article said.

Rosenberg said that though the paper had “a humorous direction,” it’s based on published research. “The background is serious,” he said.

But fliers prone to gas should take preventative measures. Post suggests Beano.

 This weather is a rarity across the Drake Passage. Mostly, the seas are very rough. We would normally expect a much rougher time with difficulty standing up / walking and people sea sick all over the place. The crew were telling us that on their previous voyage, they lost a day of their expedition time as the seas were so high, the Captain had to simply heave to, and stand still for 14 hours, with the bow facing into the enormous waves and wind. That’s so much of a contrast to our luck!

 This morning, we were up again for an 8.00 am breakfast, and we filled in the day with a lot of chatting and joke telling. I edited a few more of my photos. At 12.00 noon, we passé around Cape Horn. We could see its headland about 7 nautical miles away, but that was as close as we were able to go. We had a toast to the ‘Horn’ and thought about all those old mariners , especially those in sailing ships, who had horrific times getting around it.

Indeed, after lunch, I watched a movie that was shot in 1926 by a sailor on one of the largest sailing boats of the day ‘The Peking’ and the conditions were terrible. How they all surveyed the journey while furling sails in high winds and from a  height of a 17 story building is beyond me.

 This afternoon, our bags were returned from the storeroom and I made a feeble attempt at packing. It’s not so important to get everything so neat and tidy for the trip home, but I did struggle to get everything in again. We will get our embarkation procedures over dinner tonight.

 Tonight was to be a ‘formal  dinner with the Captain (Captain Beluga – Russian for ”White”) but he is sick with the same cold that has affected us all at sometime over the course of this trip. Instead, it will just be a night with our expedition leader.  As I might have mentioned in a previous post, he is a Kiwi named Graham Charles. This is the third of this type of trip that I have now undertaken, and Graham  is by far the best expedition  leader that I have experienced.

Well, I only nave one more nighty in my bed on board this ship and then it’s a long slow trip home via Buenos Aries, Santiago and Sydney. I think that I will finally get home about 48 hours after I walk down the gangway.

We are now at sea on our return trip to Ushuaia with another day and a half of sailing. We are blessed with calm winds and the sea is dead flat. This is an interesting contrast to my previous trip where we had 8 metre waves as we crossed the same stretch of sea – the Drake Passage.

Yesterday, on leaving Antarctica, we handed in all of our ‘dry skins’ (outdoor wet weather gear), gumboots and waterproof back packs. The crew now have the job of sorting then and getting them ready again for the passengers on the next trip which will depart on the afternoon that we arrive in Ushuaia.

Last night we had an auction of various goods, with the money raised going to a variety of environmentalist organisations. The top items was a chart of the ship’s route, signed by the captain and expedition leader. Its old for $2000 with the buyer also able to make the morning wake-up announcement in their own way. It was very well done by Pam as she attempted to take off the normal morning details provided by our expedition leader in her soft english voice.

Meanwhile, we are enjoying the opportunity to unwind from the frenetic levels of activity that we have had during our time in the south. Our expedition leader tells us that we have had many more landings than most other cruise ships would normally have. I think that this is because we have been relatively lucky with the weather, and also, that his detailed knowledge of the area has meant that he has been able to position us in places where we could go off the the ship for a variety of activities. It is nice to be able to sleep in until 7.30 am, rather have a call to be at the gangway at 6.00 am to fit in an excursion because there was a window in the weather that would allow us to go somewhere.

So far today, we have had two extremely different talks. One was by the most boring specialist on the ship who gave a talk on how to identify albatrosses (I, along with most people, didn’t go) and at the other extreme, we had an interesting session on photo editing by our very creative and flamboyant photo expert, Kyle from Canada.

The most interesting thing that filled in our time was watching a pod of dolphins swimming in the bnow wave of the ship.

Lunch is now over and people are either snoozing in their cabins, chatting in the lounge, or editing their photos because we know that people at home will only want to see the best 100 rather than the 3000 that we actually took.,

 Our day started at 6.00 am with a wake-up cal as we entered the Lemaire Channel. This is a narrow waterway that stretches for about six nautical miles between the continental mainland and Booth Island. It is incredibly scenic with high mountains on either side and ice covered valleys. To top this off, the sun was rising as we travelled and we were blessed with golden sunlight appearing on the mountains. It was quite cold (-1C) and the outside decks were very icy. I stayed on the top deck for a while, but the foreword mast got in the way of my photos, so I ended up moving down onto the deck at the bow of the ship. Our trip was lengthened somewhat as the channel had collected a reasonable amount of ice and we slowed as we crunched through it. Having extra time in this channel was quite a bonus.

Back, inside, breakfast and then we were out again at 10.00 for a zodiac cruise around Pleneau Island where dozens of large icebergs are blown in from the Weddell Sea and come here to die. They were all different shapes and sizes. One had a large arch that must have been 30 metres high. Another one looked like a dairy frost ice cream with a spiral of gentle rounded curves. Other looked like dragons and every other imaginable shape that you can think of. there were no accidents with Zodiacs today, thankfully. At omen time, we diode get the attention of a leopard seal  which bobbed its head out of the water, full of curiosity. The zodiacs drivers had their paddles readyto beat it off if it started t0 bite into the boat.

We were back on the ship for lunch and enjoyed the sight of six or seven minke whales swimming alongside the ship as we travelled to our next stopping point.

This was to be at Petermann Island and was our last stopping point in Antarctica on this trip. This is a 2 kilometre square island with both a Gentoo and Adelie penguin colony on it. Most of the chicks were fully grown and the adult birds were going through their annual moult. This made them look very bedraggled and sad and sorry. There is a small red hut and a cross which acts as a memorial to two early british explorers who died nearby. Another feature of the rocks on this island is that many are split vertically. They are of some form of fine grained igneous rock and when the water gets into the cavities, it freezes and splits the rock.

 By 4.00 pm we were back on the ship and we will now head out tom sea for our return trip to Ushuaia. We are relatively far down the Peninsular and it will take a little over two days to get back across the rake Passage. I will be looking forward to our daily debrief tonight to learn what the weather might be like for this long slog back to South America.

Wilhemena Bay is noted place for finding whales. Humpbacks forage here over summer on the plentiful supplies of krill before migrating north to breed. They live off their body fat until they return again to Antarctica in the following season. We must have seen ten whales during our two hour zodiac cruise and I snagged a number of good photos of their tails. The whales would float on the surface, take a few big blows and then dive with their typical humped back out of the water and show their tail flukes. A few minutes later, they would surface somewhere else nearby.

We saw some cute chinstrap and Gentoo penguins on a floating iceberg as well as a few crab eater seals hauled out on other chunks of ice. It was a great day in Antarctica!

We did have one little drama late in our cruise. While driving over some brash ice (chunks of wind blown ice broken off from the glaciers), we had a sharp piece of ice cut a hole in a part of the zodiac pontoon. It deflated with a very loud bang and the woman who was sitting on that section of the pontoon hit her head on a large metal caribiner attached to a rope running down the side of the zodiac. Other zodiacs came to our aid and took her, and a number of other people, back to the ship to see the doctor. Zodiacs are well designed craft and can remain afloat even if three sections of their pontoon are ruptured. Three of the group, including me, stayed on the zodiac while we travelled slowly back to the ship, but stopping to see some penguins on the way. Later inspection showed a five-foot long gash ini the pontoon and the whole outer rubber pontoon will need to be replaced. It will now be out of action for the rest of the season. I guess it’s better for this type of acci dent happen near the end of our trip, rather than at the beginning. Just as all this occurred, a Minke Whale slid right under our zodiac and surfaced just a few metres away, as if having a l;ooh at our plight.

We were due to have a second trip to another little bay, but it was iced in with brash ice that had been pushed in by the wind. It would have been impossible to get there. Instead, our second outing consisted of standing in the bow of the ship as it cruised through about 4 nautical miles of ice very slowly into the top end of the Gerlache Strait. It was fun being right in the bow as we crunched through the ice and occasionally disrupting a seal or two which were sleeping on large blocks of ice. The captain was apparently very unimpressed as he had just had the ship painted and this ice will have caused severe scratching to is new paint job.

Our afternoon excursion was in Paradise Harbour. This is a stunning deep harbour surrounded by mountains and glaciers. The scenery is fantastic. I have shot 32 gb of photos in the past two days – over 800 photos. It is hard to capture the beauty around here, but it is not through lack of trying. Some people in our group climbed a hill behind an abandoned Argentinian research station, and I went zodiac cruising  into a beautiful bay ringed by glaciers and ice cliffs. We saw icebergs of very possible size and shape. At one time, we found another two humpback whales, We followed them for a time, but they were not diving very deeply , so we didn’t get to see any displays of their tail flukes.

About 15 people took up the challenge of taking a ‘polar plunge’ this afternoon. This took place off the ricks of the Argentinian base. Some dived in, others entered the water more cautiously, but they all survived the water temperature of 1.8C. The staff had towels on hand ands they were quickly ushered back to the ship in zodiacs to get warm again. There were many jokes about the doctor having to learn how to use the defibrillator to bring people back to life again.

Dinner tonight was a barbecue on the back deck. The chefs set up a wood fired BBQ with beef, prawns and hot dogs. Mulled wine was very plentiful and desert consisted of Pecan Pie.

I have just finished photographing the golden light of sunset on the mountains around Paradise Harbour. What a special site – golden snow and clear reflections in the calm water of the bay.

Well, that’s the end of a great day in Antarctica. Tomorrow is our last day here before hitting the Drake passage to return back to Ushuaia.

 We awoke this morning to our first view of Antarctica – a scene of ice covered mountains all around us, a beautiful yellow sky as the sun rose and a temperature of -1C. The sea was black because of its depth and there were large icebergs nearby.

 This morning, we were off in zodiacs at 9.00 am, after an early breakfast to explore Curtiss Bay. While there were no outstanding features of this little bay, we spent nearly two hours exploring icebergs, little inlets and the coastline around the bay. Everywhere we looked was interesting. The mountainous hills were covered in ice to a depth of well over 50 metres. In some places, it was smooth and in others large cracks had appeared and in the crevasses the ice was a brilliant blue colour. In other places, the ice looked as though it had been fractured in many different directions as it flowed over steep sections like a rock fall.. We found some icebergs with weathered cracks and crevasses where all the light had been filtered so that the only colour left in the entire spectrum was a deep blue. Our wildlife sightings consisted of a crab eater seal and two humpback whales.

 We returned to the ship by 11.15 am and appreciated the warmth of being inside. After two hours of sitting on the edge of a zodiac, my fingers were numb and my feet were cold.

 After lunch, the ship had repositioned and we set out for a landing at Mikkelsen Harbour. A little way off the shore was a small island with a red Argentinian Refugio hut (locked), a Gentoo penguin colony and some old whaling relics. We could walk around as long as we were careful not to disturb the penguins which were moulting. Most of these were standing on rocky outcrops rising out of the snow covered surface of the island and not in areas where would disturb them anyway.

 At this time of the season, the penguin chicks are almost fully grown, but still being fed by their parents. We watched many of them hassling their parents for food and reaching right down their throat to get food from their crop. We saw six Weddell Seals, the first time I had seen any of this species of seal.

Among some of the historic whaling artefacts on the island (the name given to them by our expedition staff), were a number of old barrels and the skeleton of an old boat. They seemed to me to look more like junk!

We are expecting fine weather for the next few days and at our briefing tonight we learned that we will attempt three outings tomorrow. We are currently sailing slowly down the Gerlache Strait ready for our new adventures tomorrow.

 We have just witnessed a spectacular Antarctic sunset. The sun set behind a mountain range in a burst of orange light and lit up the sky and mountains on the other side of the strait in colours of pink and purple. I took almost 50 photos of this event. I had already taken over 300 photos today, but this was a spectacular site and required more images through which to record it.

Bedtime now, and preparations for an early start tomorrow.