Stewart Island, Oban, and Rakiura National Park...

 January 5, 2025

The good weather continued to stay with us for our stay in Oban on Stewart Island, south of the South Island of New Zealand. Tomorrow will be seven days until we leave the Seabourn Quest. She says, quietly letting tears flow. It's been a long journey, perhaps too long at our age, but we've made a couple of new friends and seen parts of the world we've never seen before and a few we have seen before.

Seabourn Quest, our "Home Away from Home" as the Captain calls it.

This is one of the "tenders" that takes us back and forth to our destination when there is no docking facility.

From the tender, this is what we see approaching the ship after a day ashore. That tiny little square down by the waterline is our miniscule landing spot.

Our miniature landing spot, AKA, "dock," up closer.

Part of the tiny (about 700 full time residents) town of Oban on Stewart Island.

Randy keeps damaging himself. Luckily for him, he has a live-in nurse.

Although Oban and Stewart Island do not get much rainfall (a lot less than Tucson), the forest surrounding it (Rakiura National Park, which encompasses more than 90% of the island), the forest is quite thick!

Our chariot for our tour.

Our guide and chariot driver.

Interesting way of honoring people, these are embedded in the ground.

Use your imagination on this, it is a GIANT link in a GIANT chain.

Another embedded saying.

A memorial to the first telephone line laid underwater to Stewart Island.

Kiwis come out in the evening so we have not seen one in the wild yet.

And so we leave Oban and head to "scenic cruising" tomorrow in Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound, a couple of places that we have been before, on a driving (in a campervan, known as an RV is the States) trip many years ago. The Captain tells us we will continue to have good weather tomorrow.