Sun Princess World Cruise 2008: Auckland, Rarotonga & Samoa
Cruise Ship Diaries Chapter 38
As I mentioned in the last chapter my saving grace on this contract was the work and though the ports will not be in the exact order the next few blogs will feature some of the amazing ports I visited during the Sun's world cruise. One of the first ports was Auckland, New Zealand and a trip to the Muriwai Gannet Colony (https://www.newzealand.com/uk/feature/muriwai-gannet-colony/)
As you can see from the amazing shot (that is not mine, or from the day I went) above it is a stunning location, unfortunately on my first trip there it looked something more like this.
Our hike through the rainforest to get to the Gannet colony lived up to its name with rain pissing down throughout the grey wet day, later we moved onto a black sand beach and then some more trekking through the mud for the rest of the day.
Rainforest tours are not really my thing, I appreciate natural beauty as much as the next person but when its pissing it down and muddy I'd rather not be stood in a rainforest getting told about the history of trees and plants!
Looking back at this video I remember thinking how much this tour sucked at the time, although it probably didn't help that fairly soon after the above picture was taken I stacked it into the muddy water drenching myself but luckily not the camera! I'm sure on a day with better weather I would have much more appreciated the New Zealand coastline and wildlife.
Now Rarotonga in the Cook Islands was much more like it (as you can see from the above video!) with great weather and a 4WD island adventure tour! We all got loaded up into 4x4's and took of at great speed all over the island, this involved some seriously steep hills with several PAX bricking it that we'd tip over or at least come off the road.
I'm still fairly horrified by how bad by filming was in this video with way too many zoom outs and PAX shots in the video. There was also a bit of chill out time at the beach in the thumbnail above before we had a coconut demo where we got to see the islands split a coconut with a sharp stick!
We also made it to Tafatafa beach in Apia, Samoa where once again we had another day of downpours and shitty weather, although the day started off pleasent enough with everyone getting lei's as we got on the bus and then of course it began pissing it down again!
From experience I've learned the best place to visit in rainy weather is waterfalls as you can see below
Its funny that despite being in different countries the itinaries for the tours in Rarotonga and Apia were almost identical, a 4wD tour of the island, a beach stop and a demo on how to break a coconut. I always wondered if some of the PAX had done the same two tours as me and did any of them complain about doing the exact same activities!
There was always a strange dichotomy at work when filming ashore as many times you are rushed and have no idea about the places you are going to be visting that day, this means you are unprepared for what you need to film and it always annoyed me that you were in these amazing once in a lifetime places but you had so little time and had to put your focus on the guests in the video rather the places.
A pet peeve would be when PAX asked you to take their picture when you only have 10 minutes to film a location and are trying to maxmise your shot count! Worse still is when they asked you to take their picture on my camera as then you have to get into the whole 'its a video camera, not a stills camera' arguement and then they'd usually say 'we'll put us in the video and we'll buy it' which at this point unfortunately we still had to do.
Also as you can see from the shitty weather in two of the above videos, the weather can make or break the sales from a shoot. If its pissing down with rain and everyone looks miserable then its not good footage for the tour company or us. Then you have to make the decision 'Do I keep filming?' even though you know its going to be largely shit. At this stage I was still worried about not having enough footage so even when a tour was crap I would still film the shit out of it just so I could make an edit, it was only later as a senior when its purely your decision that you can say 'fuck it, that was a terrible tour and shitty footage and we'd be better using stock footage'
On the next cruise diaries - Paper Plane Challenge and other onboard events from the world cruise!
About the Creator
Neil Gregory
Film and TV obsessive / World Traveller / Gamer / Camerman & Editor / Guitarist
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