My views do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
The first time we came to the port of Tauranga, we had a drill in the morning. The Entertainment Department rolled out of bed and down to the Princess Theater for one of our pre-drill bi-weekly department meetings. The meeting was just shy of wrapping up when the crew alert alarm went off. We grabbed our life jackets and headed to our muster stations. As we were checking off and going through the motions, I realized that I hadn’t heard the First Stage Response. In the event of an emergency, the first step is to call First Stage Response– a team of people who go and assess the situation. If they can’t figure it out in 8 minutes, Crew Alert will go off, which sends crew to their positions. In real emergencies, we listen for first stage response and then cross our fingers. Usually, we get the announcement to stand down before it goes to Crew Alert. The system does have a backup plan, however. If a fire alarm goes off, someone has to press a button at the point where they tell the first stage response to stand down. If they don’t press the button, crew alert will automatically go off. This has happened a couple of times. Once I was in the middle of dinner when the crew alert signal went off– with no first stage response. I dropped my fork and scrambled up the stairs toward my cabin to get my life jacket. Of course when I got to deck 11 (surpassing my typical 4 deck stair limit), the announcement was made that there wasn’t an emergency and crew could stand down. In a drill (and well, always) we listen to the first stage response to find out where the emergency is, so we can avoid it on our way to our Muster Station. But this time, there was no First Stage Response. There also wasn’t the announcement telling the guests that this was a drill and they didn’t need to do anything. I told my Muster Personnel to prepare for guests– they might come, even though this was supposed to be a drill. The thing that was unique about this drill was that nobody knew what was going on. We went to our Muster Stations and waited for further instruction, but there really wasn’t much of that. Eventually, they did make the announcement for the guests and then eventually we were all told to stand down when the drill was considered complete. Matt went up to the bridge for the debrief, and then we went for lunch in Tauranga afterward, at Astrolabe– my favorite beer garden in New Zealand. I learned that the Captain (Captain Gavin Pears) had set off the smoke alarms on the bridge, put up signs that the bridge was on fire, grabbed the Staff Captain (second in command), told him he was dead, and then they headed up to deck 16 to watch the show. People kept coming to the bridge, past the signs that said it was on fire, so they were dead (just pretend dead). By the end, the 4th person in charge was in charge. The ship had continued sailing (again, pretend sailing) for 20 minutes before someone stopped the ship. It was so cool. Sometimes these drills are like going through the motions, but it’s hard to prepare for the chaos that is inevitable in a real emergency. It was so cool to figure out all these circumstances that we couldn’t plan for in an area of safety. It was my favorite drill (my second favorite was on the Caribbean when my Muster Station was on fire and we had to relocate to the Piazza), and I just thought the Captain was so cool for helping us learn in that way.
After lunch, we ran into the Captain on the way back and talked about the drill some more with him. He shared his point of view and we went over the whole story again. We talked about this drill for months. It was so sad when people would go on vacation and be replaced by people who weren’t there. Captain and Matt headed back to the ship to work, cause that’s what important people do. I still had some time on my hands so I decided to climb the mountain that was right by the ship– Mount Maunganui.
At the port, I ran into Paola, a very friendly bartender. She asked what I was doing and I told her I was going to climb the mountain. She asked if she could join me, so we headed toward the mountain. We ran into some guests who had just come down. I mentioned that I’d heard it was about 45 minutes up. They said it took them 4 hours. It was gorgeous, but there were steep steps and it basically went straight up. We decided to go anyway.
We passed some of my friends barbequeing, so we took a couple of bites that were offered. A couple of months later, I would find myself at that same barbeque with the shoppies, hanging out with Susan, an old friend from the Caribbean.
At the base of the hill one option seemed to go toward the beach, the other to the top of the mountain. We took the latter. I don’t remember prompting her, but Paola told me her life story on the way up. She spoke very quickly with her thick Peruvian accent, so I think I got a third of it. The views were awesome, but I decided to take pictures on my way down (I was assuming we would come down the same way). We ran into a few crew coming down as we climbed the steep road twisting and turning around the mountain. After about 45 minutes, we reached the top. It wasn’t as much of a struggle as the guests had indicated. At the top there were more crew, and another way down. We fell in with Alice, one of the dancers, and decided to take the road less travelled back. The trees closed in around us, and here were the steps the guests were talking about!
They were so steep! It would have been miserable coming up this way!
With all the greenery around us, I soaked it all in. I was in New Zealand!
When we reached the bottom, Paola had to go back to work. Alice was going to check out a blow hole that she’d read about online. I opted for the blow hole!
I’d heard about Alice from Matt. She’d taken a bunch of extra safety corses that she didn’t need to take, but she had time. Boy, did she have an interesting story. She had gone to medical school, but didn’t really want to practice medicine, so she decided to try out for this dancing gig and found herself on a ship.
We wove around the mountain to the beach, to an island that used to be a resort.
We weren’t really sure where the blowhole was supposed to be, so we asked some other people. They didn’t know about the blow hole, but everyone thought it was a good idea to climb over some rocks to check out what was on the other side.
We found something that also looked like it could have been the blow hole, but it wasn’t the right time of day. We were still having a great time. We stopped for ice cream on the way back and sat by the water hanging out as long as possible before having to go back to the ship. I had to get back in time to tie some ropes together because Corey wanted to turn the Piazza into a Pirate party.
I took these pictures on another day when I caught the sail away on my way to Liar’s Club (the glasses make me more believable).
Ok, I lived in Colorado long enough that anyone from there would call this thing a hill, not a mountain, but it’s more fun to say that I climbed a mountain. And it was really fun to watch it go by from the ship picturing myself on those trails just hours earlier.
