More Successful Shopping in Mount Maunganui

Day 31, Grand World Voyage

Friday, Feb. 3, 2023; Tauranga, New Zealand.

I’m getting to know my way around the shops and restaurants in Mount Maunganui, the port village for Tauranga. The city of Tauranga is about 20 minutes away by bus, but I have yet to visit there. When the cruise line didn’t provide us a shuttle, my sisters and I just stayed at the port and walked to the village. I did the same thing in November when I was here on the Westerdam.

There’s something about casual sun dresses that I have come to love. It started almost a year ago when I bought a couple at a boutique on St. Armand Circle near Sarasota, Fla. In the past I avoided all-cotton and linen dresses because I didn’t want to iron them. In fact, I sold my iron and ironing board long ago. But now, I can simply send them out to the laundry on the ship, and they come back looking like new.

Last fall I found a lot of cute dresses in Airlie Beach, Australia, and wrote at the time that I would return there for future shopping. Today I discovered the same brand — Lulalife — in a shop in Mount Maunganui. I added two more dresses and a light sweater to throw on when the dining room is cold. One dress in kelly green will be perfect for St. Patrick’s Day.

It does occur to me that it might be cheaper to buy a pricey shore excursion than to keep shopping in these ports, though ….

It’s obvious that we have left the tropics. Even though it is summer here, New Zealand is pretty far south. Think New England. It was cloudy all day, but any rain held off until after we left. As in most ports, we are required to use a local pilot for coming and going, and I love to get a photo of his transfer to the smaller boat. Today was pretty calm.

There were other options to fill the day from this port. Five years ago, I joined a tour to Rotorua and a Maori village whose short name is Whakarewarewa. I wrote about the long name in 2017. It was one of the more interesting tours I have taken and taught me a great bit about the first inhabitants of New Zealand, the Maoris. New Zealand was the last land group populated by the early Polynesians.

Another popular trip is to the Hobbiton movie set made famous by the Lord of the Rings movies.  I haven’t read the books and only saw one of the movies, so the tour didn’t immediately appeal to me. A friend from my cruise last fall said it was a lot of fun, even if you haven’t seen the movies. I’ll leave it on my list for next time.

Closer to home, you can hike on Mount Maunganui, the dormant volcano that lies at the end of the peninsula and gives the port village its name. The more adventurous can take the summit walk, which reaches the peak 830 feet above the sea. My friend Ralph did just that today, being a fit man in his 80s, along with his friend Peter. The easier hike is the two-mile base path around the mountain. It’s on my list, but that also will need to wait for another visit.

In November I sketched the mountain, and on one of our earlier sea days on this cruise I got around to painting it.

Elaine found a nail salon for a pedicure, and we stopped for lunch on the main street at AstroLabe Brewing. It is nice to have something different from the ship’s cuisine, even if the Aloha Mood Hawaiian pizza wasn’t quite what I expected, with lots of pesto floating around on top. Elaine had a local beer and I splurged (calorie-wise) on a Shark Alley berry slushy.

Mount Maunganui is a charming beach town. The dozen blocks of shops and restaurants are surrounded by small apartment buildings, vacation and rental homes and miles of beaches. Today was just a little too overcast for a beach day, but this would have been a good place for playing in the surf.

I’m missing the long stretches of sea days that we had earlier in this world cruise. Now we are in a different cadence – a few days of ports, a couple of days at sea. My sketching and painting will have to wait for sea days. On these port days I start the day writing early in the Crow’s Nest before getting ready to go ashore. I don’t have as much time as I would like for editing and rewriting my posts. This brings me back to my days of newspaper reporting – there’s always a deadline. I have to stop polishing the writing, make one last check for typos and just click “publish.”