Here’s the view from one of the observation decks at the front of the ship.
Although the wind makes a bit of noise in the microphone, it’s a lovely
peaceful place where not many people visit – probably because it’s difficult to find, and hard to open the door 🙂
The captain has just informed us that our engine problems have caused our
speed to drop to a bit over half what it should be, which means we have to cancel some ports.
Rather than stopping at Wellington and Napier, he has decided to sail
straight to Auckland so that we get there on time.
The cruise duration will be the same – we’ll arrive in Auckland on
Saturday. We just won’t stop anywhere on the way.
Here’s a quick view of Aurora’s atrium and its impressive water sculpture.
Here’s another video of the sea this morning.
It’s flat and calm.
The only problem is that our engines aren’t working too well, and we’re only going a bit over half our normal speed.
I don’t know how this will affect our arrival time into Wellington, but I’ll let you know.
Regardless of how fast we’re going, it’s still great to be here.
Formal night tonight. And I’m lookng forward to watchng a classical piano concert before dinner.
More news later.
How good is this?
Here’s a video of our cabin, the view from our window, and the deck outside. Lots of Englash Flags flying everywhere, but it’s nice to see a few Aussie ones on board too, even though she’s an english ship.
One of the reasons the first fleet decided to set up camp in Sydney Cove was because of the fresh water.
A small stream called “The Tank Stream” flowed into the harbour near where they landed.
Today it’s covered over by roads, railway lines, wharves and 200 years of other city “stuff”.
But if you look closley on the pavement at the top of Pitt Street near Circular Quay, you can see this marker which shows where the stream flows.
And if you’re lucky enough, you can be one of the few tourists who gets to do an underground tour of what’s left of the stream.
Look up “Tank Stream” on wikipedia of you’re interested.
It’s amazing what history lies under our feet, waiting to be rediscovered.
A view of our ship, and Sydney Harbour from Circular Quay.
Sorry about some of the camera movement – I’ll do a better job next video. Promise!
I’ll try an upload a video of our room and the view from our window later on this afternoon.
Here’s my first attempt at a video blog post.
I did this to see what sort of effort is necessary to do a blog entry because I’m going to do a few of these over the next week as part of my cruise.
My Nokia N95 does pretty good quality videos, and it lets you edit them. But here’s a few points that you need to bear in mind.
1. Each video records about 2mb per minute. So for posting blog entries on a cruise ship I’m going to have to limit myself to one minute posts.
2. The N95 has a “pause” button that lets you stop filming for a while, but if you pause too long, the video stops, and you have to record a new one rather than add to the existing one.
3. The N95 editor lets you merge videos together, but once merged, the size of the video bloats out. E.g. I had two 30 second videos, each 1mb in size. I merged them and the result was 14mb in size. Try this a few times with a number of video fragments. I ended up with a 140mb monster that took a couple of hours to merge!
4. So I had to convert this video from MP4 to AVI using Blink. Then I loaded the resulting 200mb file into windows movie maker, which I got to spit out a 15mb video which you can see here.
5. I will be posting to Blogger via Flickr. This is because Blogger rejects any email attatchments that are more than about 250kb in size. Flickr allows larger video attachments, but the maximum duration is only 90 seconds. There’s one other “gotcha” in Flickr. When it posts to Blogger it sets the height and width of the video to 0px so it’s invisible. So you have to edit the post after the fact, and set the height and width to something reasonable. Painful over a slow connection, but that’s the only choice I have.
So in onboard posts over the next few days, please excuse me if I talk really fast 🙂
