Arrivals & Departures Weekly Travel News & Views 31 December 2024

HOT & FESTIVE

I hope you’ve had a fun and festive week — perhaps a chance to spend time with family and friends. If you’ve been in Dunsborough, I hope you found somewhere to park.

It’s been a cool Christmas, but before that, we had those hot days. As I came out of our offices on Jon Sanders Drive, Osborne Park, on Monday, my motorcycle display said 44C. Well, it is summer in Western Australia! And to celebrate that, we have an A to Z of Summer in WA in next Saturday’s edition.

MAKING DAYS COUNT

I’m aware many people work hard through the festive holidays, hopefully with a day off here and there. It’s nice to use our pause days well (when they’re cool). I’ve been trying out the Stories Unseen app, which won a 2024 Western Australian Heritage Award. It’s in app stores. Historical narratives are brought to life by clever tech. Perth CBD tours focus on historical pubs, colonial history and “murder and macabre true crime”.

One of its signature tours is WA’s Enterprising Women. It is $24.99 to download, but that lasts for a year, can be shared with up to five other devices and includes seven podcast-style audio stops and matched photos, videos and audio.

SKIN CARE ON HIGH

What’s the perfect 30,000 feet, in-flight skincare routine? Air New Zealand cabin crew Charlotte Meiklejohn has been sharing skincare tips and says keeping skin hydrated is essential. Charlotte’s carry-on must-haves including make-up wipes, a nourishing facial moisturiser, a hydrating sleep mask for overnight flights, a soothing lip balm and a rich hand cream. “These essentials keep me fresh and hydrated throughout the journey,” she explains.

BITING WARNING

And our friends at the Australian Dental Association are warning not to let oral health slip while on holidays. A spokesperson tells me:

Lower humidity during flights can cause dehydration which results in a dry mouth — “a breeding ground for bacteria and tooth decay”. Drink lots of water on the flight and take an empty water bottle in your check-in for easy refills at your destination.

The spokesperson warns: “Dry, stale air circulating on long haul flights coupled with lots of food and little opportunity for bathroom mouth-freshens can add up to lots of food build-up and bad breath. This is made worse if your flight is delayed and you spend extra time at the airport snacking on treats, or you have a long stopover. The fix: pack a toothbrush in your hand luggage and a mini tube of fluoride toothpaste so you can brush after meals.”

GREEN SET

All six of Pan Pacific Hotels Group’s Australian hotels have been awarded the Global Sustainable Tourism Council Industry Criteria for Hotels certification. It’s quite a mouthful, but the recognition is for sustainable tourism practices across four key areas — sustainability planning, maximising social and economic benefits for the local community, enhancing cultural heritage, and reducing negative impact to the environment. Managing to reach the mark for all six properties marks PPHG as a pioneer in sustainable hospitality. They are the first in the Oceania region to attain this globally recognised standard. The six certified Australian properties are: Pan Pacific Perth, Pan Pacific Melbourne, Parkroyal Melbourne Airport, Parkroyal Monash Melbourne, Parkroyal Darling Harbour Sydney and Parkroyal Parramatta Sydney.

CRAVING CULINARY

MSC Cruises has been looking into what will drive travel decisions in 2025, and thinks the “craving for culinary tourism” will be a motivator. A spokesperson says: “Food is now a driving force behind destination choices. More travellers than ever are now planning trips specifically to explore unique restaurants or culinary experiences, planning to immerse themselves in local food markets, take part in specialist cooking workshops or heading out on a tasting tour.”

SHORE TO SHIP

... from MSC’s perspective, the spokesperson points out that its ships cruise to foodie hotspots such as Naples, Palermo (Italy), Barcelona (Spain) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). There are culinary shore excursions like visiting wineries in the Italian countryside, savouring tapas in Alicante (Spain), or attempting to recreate Greek dishes during a cooking workshop in a family-run olive oil mill in the agricultural region of Katakolon (Greece). Back on board, there are up to 11 restaurants with food styles from around the world. Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt has shaped the farm-to-ocean ethos gastronomy in Chef’s Garden Kitchen on MSC World Europa.

RAW VESSEL

I love a “float-out”. This is when a vessel under construction is put in the water for the first time. This is when I see it as a raw piece of marine architecture, before it’s all fancied up. The nuances of their hull shapes are laid bare. And the new Star Seeker yacht for Windstar Cruises, pictured at the top of the page, has just been floated out of the building dock at the WestSEA Shipyard in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. This is the first Star Class new build. Construction of Star Seeker’s exterior is complete, but the inside has to be completed, with 112 suites. The ship will have five dining options and a new take on the line’s Watersports Platform, which turns the ocean into an infinity pool by providing guests access to the sea directly from the ship. It will enter service in December of 2025, and eventually sail to Asia to bring back the line’s popular Around Japan itineraries.

DEEPSEA LEADER

The Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney has become the temporary home of The Deepsea Challenger — the submersible which took James Cameron to the deepest trenches of the ocean in 2012. It stars in a new exhibition called Ultimate Depth: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea. Challenger was designed, tested and co-engineered in Sydney by Ron Allum, a Sydney cave diver, engineer, deep-sea explorer and former NSW Senior Australian of the Year. Challenger is back in Sydney for the first time since its expedition to the Mariana Trench and Ron says it is a monument to engineering and science: “I believe we came up with new methods of doing deep-sea exploration that are now becoming commonplace in the industry.”

The exhibition takes visitors from the ocean’s surface to its depths. It includes a black smoker hydrothermal vent — one of only a handful in the world. “Black smokers” are chimneys formed from deposits of iron sulfide.

The exhibition starts at the sunlight zone and travels through the twilight zone, midnight zone, abyssal zone and finally the hadal zone, highlighting technologies that unveil the secrets of the deep and the creatures there.

LOW AS YOU GET

The hadal zone is the ocean’s deepest region, in trenches from 6km to 11km below sea level. Perth Canyon, which starts about 30km off Fremantle, is a deep ocean gorge as big as the Grand Canyon in the US and more than 4km deep, dropping to the abyssal sea floor. It probably formed more than a 100 million years ago when WA separated from India.