Cruising "Down Under"

HOBART, TASMANIA — Rudy, the Tasmanian devil, huffed and puffed and growled and screeched. But that was about it. He couldn't even stand up and spin like a top.

The dark, furry little guy just ran around having a hissy fit while a trainer in his outdoor pen teased him with a bone. With the head of a pit bull and the rear end of a opossum, of which he is a distant cousin in the marsupial family, Rudy didn't look at all like his cartoon counterpart.

"Tasmanian devils aren't fierce hunters — they don't hunt at all," said Maggie, our tour guide. "They're very small, with weak back legs and poor eyesight. They go through the bush and eat carrion." While Rudy was something of a disappointment, nearly everything else lived up to its billing on a cruise that started off in New Zealand, visited the Australian island of Tasmania and ended with stops on Australia's mainland at Melbourne and Sydney.

Variety aplenty

Taking a cruise "Down Under" showed a land of coastal cities with yacht-filled harbors; long beaches perfect for surfing; ancient forests with ferns the size of palm trees; and unique animals such as emus, kiwis and Rudy the Tasmanian devil.

I visited Rudy at his home in the Bonorong Wildlife Park, where he hung out with wombats and wallabies, kangaroos and koalas. The park was an hour's bus drive from Hobart where the Diamond Princess cruise ship had docked.

With 18 decks, five swimming pools, five dining rooms and 20 bars, the 2-year-old ship was a destination in itself. But with six days at sea during the 12-day cruise, there was plenty of time for onboard activities. So, like many of the 2,670 passengers, I opted for daily shore excursions when in port, like the visit to the wildlife park.

Information

Diamond Princess: Besides Australia and New Zealand, the 1,337-cabin ship cruises in Alaska, Asia and the Mexican Riviera

Onboard fun: The ship has five dining rooms, five pools, five showrooms/lounges, a casino, four duty-free shops, a fitness center and spa, sports deck, children's and teen's centers, golf putting course and simulator, basketball/paddle tennis court.

Details : Princess Cruises, 800-774-6237 or www.princess.com

When cruising first became popular three decades ago, shore excursions consisted of two choices — a bus ride to see the sights of the port city or transportation to a beach. Today, you can still go ashore to explore on your own. But the cruise also offered more exotic, and more expensive, choices (not included in the $2,295 cost per person for a shared balcony stateroom.)

Besides my trip to see Rudy, which included a hike through a forest of 400-year-old eucalyptus trees, I visited a volcanic valley and dined with Maori warriors; roared up a river gorge on a jet boat; chugged on a vintage train to a mountaintop; snorkeled with sea dragons; and walked over the top arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a catwalk originally built for maintenance crews. Most of the excursions were $100-plus per person and involved a bus ride of an hour or so, with the driver or tour guide providing a commentary about the countryside.

A Maori start

A 12-hour flight from Los Angeles deposited us at our starting point in Auckland, a cosmopolitan metropolis on New Zealand's North Island. We rested up a day before boarding the Diamond Princess and heading 141 nautical miles south to the port city of Tauranga.

The Maori had paddled canoes from Polynesia to New Zealand some 400 years before the British explorer Capt. James Cook arrived in 1769. The European colonialists who followed treated the Maori much like American settlers treated the Indians.

There are no full-blooded Maori left, but the warriors who greeted us at Waimangu Volcanic Valley looked real enough to me. With tattooed faces and bodies, they stomped their feet, swung their staffs and stuck out their tongues in a fearful show of force. Later, over a glass of wine at lunch, one warrior revealed that his facial tattoos were applied with mascara.

New Zealand is a land of volcanoes, and the valley had steaming lakes and gurgling geysers thanks to hydrothermal power. Inferno Crater, an inviting pool the turquoise color of the Caribbean, had 180-degree waters as corrosive as hydrochloric acid. As we walked in the shade of giant tree ferns, the primordial setting explained the valley's subtitle, "Where the World Began."

A tearful ride

Christchurch, our next port city, is the largest city on New Zealand's South Island and billed as "the most English city outside of England." It had a Gothic cathedral, street names like Worcester and Gloucester and the shaded River Avon running through, where you can take a punt ride under the weeping willows. A punt is a flat-bottomed boat with broad square ends.

But we were after action, and headed by bus across the patchwork fields of the Canterbury Plains to the Waimakariri River Canyon in the foothills of the Southern Alps. In 1957, a New Zealander named William Hamilton invented the jet boat for traveling the shallow, gravel-choked rivers that run through the canyon.

Waimakariri is a Maori word that means "river of cold rushing water," so we bundled up in hooded windbreakers and lifejackets before taking off with Garth of Alpine Jet at the controls. The glacier-fed river runs by steep cliffs and has boulders in midstream. Garth prided himself in coming as close as possible to the rock. In some places the river was just wide enough for the 20-passenger boat; in others it opened up, and that's where Garth would wave a finger, and we'd hang on as he spun in a full circle like an amusement-park ride. We thought the 45-minute ride was over too soon.

A train from Dunedin

Dunedin, our last stop in New Zealand, had a more calming, charming ride. A train of vintage wood dining cars picked us up at the dock and headed into the Taiera Gorge. It was a pleasant means of seeing a lot of country. The train passed the "lifestyle farms" of five-acre tracts where homeowners with jobs in the city can still keep a few horses or sheep. New Zealanders are proud of saying they have 4 million residents and 40 million sheep, most of them merinos raised for their high-quality wool.

We went through tunnels so tight that the train seemed to barely fit. From trestles high over the whiskey-colored Taiera River, we saw ducks, geese and the black swans that are everywhere in New Zealand. The gorge closed in as we approached the summit, where sheep grazed on the treeless, boulder-strewn mountaintops.

Finding a fantasy

Sea dragons get my vote as the most curious creature in the ocean. Close relatives to seahorses, they are larger and have leaf-like appendages that enable them to hide among kelp and seaweed. I had seen sea dragons in aquariums, and jumped at the chance to snorkel with them in the bay across from Melbourne in Australia.

But I had been whale watching on a previous trip and found no whales. How do you spot an 18-inch-long piece of what looks like swimming seaweed in an ocean of seaweed?

Midway through, I feared the trip was a bust. Clad in wet suits, a dozen other snorkelers and I flapped against each other on the bobbing waves beneath the pier in the tiny village of Portsea. Mel, our guide, asked us to stay within the encrusted pilings because of the boat traffic nearby. He showed us brittle stars, urchins, sea slugs and porcupine fish. No sea dragons.

Miraculously, Mel dove to the bottom to a patch of sea grass and came up, gently coaxing (but not touching) a sea dragon with his hands. Green with yellow spots on its spine, it had a long pipe-like snout and fluttering fins. It floated unhurriedly through the water for five or 10 minutes, before disappearing into the kelp.

Climbing the bridge

You're required to sign a waiver, put your watch and other personal possessions into a locker, walk through a metal detector, don a jumpsuit with a headset and take an alcohol-breath test before climbing across the top arch of the bridge that spans Sydney Harbour. You also pay $128 for the privilege.

But it took Sydney entrepreneur Paul Cave nine years to resolve the city's safety concerns, including the possibility of dropped objects hitting traffic on the bridge below.

The walks began in 1998, and some 200,000 people now make the climb each year. There are 1,439 steps up and down, with the trek taking more than two hours. A waist harness tethers hikers to a steel cable that runs along a railing.

We stood at the top, more than 400 feet above the water, and saw Sydney's famous Opera House, the prime minister's house and actor Russell Crowe's house far below.