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Content Notes

Together, Mei-O and I took a lot of pictures and videos (me: 2,564, Mei-O: 341). It took me quite a while to go through them all, choose the ones that I wanted to usethere are about 1,100 pictures and 45 videos here, edit many of them (straighten them, fix perspective issues, adjust brightness and contrast, remove window reflections from those taken through bus windows (when possible), etc.), research them when necessary, and write the narrative to go along with them to show the progression of our journey. It is important to note that this is not just a website full of pictures of beautiful scenery and historic sites that we saw on the trip, but rather, a relatively complete chronological accounting of where we went, what we did, and what we saw, including things like street scenes (without us in the picture), the open sea (on sea days), our ship, some of our meals, selfies, maps, and other perhaps somewhat mundane pictures. The format of the site makes it easy to skim through pictures when you find them not as interesting as you hoped.

Some Further Notes

General

1. Sydney is 17 hours ahead of us. As we cruised, heading further east to New Zealand, we went through two time zones (we found this on our bed when we returned to our room two nights in a row), ending up in Auckland, 19 hours ahead of Rochester!
2. Currently, New Zealand is undergoing a Māori language revival, "a movement to promote, reinforce and strengthen the use of te reo Māori, the Māori language. Primarily in New Zealand, but also in places with large numbers of expatriate New Zealanders (such as London and Melbourne), the movement aims to increase the use of Māori in the home, in education, government, and business. The movement is part of a broader revival of tikanga Māori (Māori culture, cultural habits and practices) in what has been called the Māori renaissance." (from Wikipedia). This is why you may notice the use of Māori language in some signs in the pictures on this website, and also in some of the text that accompanies the pictures.
3. If you see any prices in the pictures, during our trip, the Australian dollar was worth around US$0.66. The New Zealand dollar was equal to approximately US$0.60.
4. There are a lot of holes in the website's timeline, especially on days when we were at sea all day (and there were many). Much of that time was spent doing, well, I don't actually know, but whatever it was, it wasn't interesting enough to take pictures. Or if it was interesting, I either forgot to take any, or wasn't in a picture taking mood.
5. I really failed at capturing our meals. For some of them I may have taken only one or two pictures, and not actually of a significant part of the meal (maybe just a bowl of soup), especially when we ate in the Horizon Bistro's buffet when we kept going back for more and more small plates of stuff. So you'll often see a single picture used as a place marker just to maintain the timeline's continuity.
6. There are bound to be some errors in here; typos, spelling errors, links that don't work, factual errors, grammatical errors, etc. Please feel free to let me know if you find any. As a note, when viewing the site on a phone or tablet, there are several programming bugs (mostly related to font sizes. You'll know them when you see them) that I just haven't been able to fix (I'm not that great of a web developer, I just sort of "wing it" at times.) Any other comments, questions, or help improving this site are also welcome.

Navigating this website

1. As you're viewing the various pages of this website, click on any picture to see it full size.
2. If (on a desktop computer) you hover your pointing device over any of the days on the Day line (except for Pre-trip),
   
   Day  Pre-trip   1-2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18
   where we were that day will pop up. (Try it, though the links purposely don't work here.)
3. When you see a link followed by a minutes and seconds designation in parenthesis like this, (0:25), it means the link is to a video and the numbers represent the length of the video. The video will open in a new window. Be sure to close it when you're done.
4. When you see a word or phrase underlined like
   thisa supplemental note or quick fact
   , hovering your mouse pointer over it will display a short supplemental note or a quick fact.
5. When I have a bunch of pictures to display with no narrative needed (e.g., when we cruised through the Fiordland National Park), a link will be displayed which will, when clicked, pop up another window displaying the pictures. (Some of the pictures may have a short narrative under them.) Additionally, on some of these pop-up window pages, when I felt it was important to see the pictures full-sized, you can click on the picture and it will open in another window so you can see it better. You'll be advised at the top of the page or under an individual picture as to whether that feature is available or not.

You can begin with day 1 of our journey (getting from Rochester to Australia) by clicking on the cute little wombat below, or you can go to the day-by-day list below to view any specific day or place. And be sure to check out the "extra pages" below.

A 6-month old baby wombat