ZECO TRAVEL TALK

Perhaps it was the penguin pecking at your boot during your first visit to Antarctica. Or the thrill you felt exploring legendary Pitcairn Island. Whatever your favorite Zegrahm or Eco Expeditions memory, we’d love to hear about it. Please share your story/favorite memory as a comment to this blog post. Read more

December 21: Queenstown welcomed us with a bluebird day that said, “This expedition is going to be a beauty!” Gondola ascents carried some to far-reaching views of the Southern Alps, paragliders, and bungy jumpers, while others simply savored the cafés and shops of this spectacular alpine town. We met our expedition leader, Lia Oprea, and expedition staff for informal drinks at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

December 22: The next morning we met up with our fellow expeditioners from Noble Caledonia and made the 155-mile journey to Milford Sound. Spectacular scenery, green and sheepish, swept past with a stop at the Te Anau Wildlife Centre for a rare look at the flightless takahe and an opportunity to photograph the rock wren. Read more

Since we saw her play three years ago, many of you have asked me for an update on the incredible story of Dasha Bukhartseva. Dasha (then 12 and 13 years old) played piano solos at concerts in Odessa, Ukraine, given during Zegrahm’s stop there on its Circumnavigation of the Black Sea. In 2006, at one of those concerts, passengers Dan and Lynne Levinson were so taken with Dasha that they arranged for her to attend the Aspen Music Festival and School during the summers of 2007 and 2008. Likewise, Mieke and Hendrick Smit, who were passengers on a different departure of that trip, were so impressed with Dasha that they helped to arrange for Anne Schein (a highly regarded pianist) to be her teacher in Aspen. Dasha, accompanied by her mom, lived with the Levinsons in Aspen for both summers. Read more

Albatross are special. Even for people with absolutely no interest in birds, these immense creatures instill a sense of admiration and awe. Soaring effortlessly over the world’s oceans, they are the most itinerant life forms on our planet, circumnavigating the globe many times a year and flying millions of miles in a lifetime.

Our Wild Edge of the Pacific trip from the Chathams to New Zealand carries us through the global epicenter of albatross evolution, with well over half of all species nesting on New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands. Read more

It’s not often that the partners of Zegrahm Expeditions visit a place where none of us have ever been. So when the Clipper Odyssey pulled into the Chatham Islands, our final destination on the inaugural Wild Edge of the Pacific trip, the excitement was palpable.

The previous evening, while sailing in from Gisborne (on the “mainland,” as the Chatham Islanders prefer to call the North Island), had given the birders a taste of what lay in store when we’d encountered a single magenta petrel. The sighting of this almost mythical species, one of two critically endangered seabirds restricted to the Chatham group, occurred at the end of an entire day’s sea-watching from the deck… and in the middle of a staff meeting! Peter and I emerged to find a small posse of hardened birders, their expressions a mixture of delight and apology. Read more

Dr. Jack Grove, Zegrahm Expeditions’ cofounder and expedition leader, recently contributed to a report that outlines how climate change, overfishing, and tourism have negatively impacted the Galapagos Islands’ delicate ecosystem. In just a few decades, 45 Galapagos species are thought to have already disappeared or are teetering on the verge of extinction. The report was originally published in the scientific journal, Global Change Biology, and has been picked up by BBC News and circulated by Metropolitan Touring in Quito, Ecuador, among other news sources. Read the full text from the BBC article.

In addition to Jack’s work on this ground-breaking white paper, he also contributed to Tui De Roy’s, Galapagos: Preserving Darwin’s Legacy. This book is an authoritative, up-to-date survey from a variety of authors and researchers on the natural history, ecology and conservation of the Galapagos. Read the book review here. Read more

On November 24, 2009, the Clipper Odyssey anchored off the coast of Niuatoputapu, a remote island in the Kingdom of Tonga. Back in late-September of this year, this regular stop on our Hidden Gems of the South Pacific itinerary was rocked by an 8.3 magnitude earthquake that shook the ocean floor between the island archipelagos of Samoa and Tonga, causing a large tsunami. No one on Tonga had experienced a tsunami before, despite frequently occurring earthquakes. The wall of water not only devastated many of the coastal villages, but also resulted in nine deaths.

Upon hearing the news that the tsunami hit the little-known island of Niuatoputapu, the Zegrahm office immediately started questioning whether to go someplace else, or continue on with this port call as planned. Not only did Zegrahm decide to visit the island, but also provide the villagers who were trying to rebuild their lives with much needed essentials. Read more

In late November, just before departing for our epic Fiji to Chatham voyage aboard the Clipper Odyssey, Peter Harrison described the epic rediscovery of three “lost” seabird species. Two of these, the almost mythical Fiji petrel and the similarly rare Vanuatu petrel, both unrecorded by ornithologists for over a century, survive around the tropical islands of Fiji and Vanuatu respectively, while the third, the New Zealand storm petrel, was known from only three specimens collected in the 1800s… until its dramatic rediscovery in the cool waters of the Hauraki Gulf North of Auckland in early 2003.

When we created the itinerary for this inaugural journey to the Kermadecs a few years ago, Peter went on to suggest that passengers who combined these two southwestern Pacific voyages might have a chance of seeing all three species. It was upon that revelation that I realized I just HAD to be on these voyages!

Approaching the Chatham Islands at the end of the first of two Wild Edge voyages, I am happy to report what can only be described as spectacular success so far: Read more