About 2000 mostly Australian tourists disembarked from the cruise ship Dawn Princess at Mount Maunganui today, the first of 42 cruise ships expected this summer.
'We've just come to have a look round town, see what's happening and enjoy ourselves,” says Eillen Shelton. Eillen and Charles were among passengers heading for Tauranga today.

Passengers heading off the Dawn Princess for their day in the Bay.

Other passengers like Barry and Anna Sutherland, Trevor and Margaret Cearns, and Trevor and Barbara Johns from Adelaide, were catching the buses for Rotorua to 'see the mudpools”.
The tourists joined the Dawn Princess in Sydney for a 13-day tour of New Zealand that began in Fiordland and headed north up the east coast calling at Port Chalmers, Lyttelton, Wellington, Napier, Tauranga and Auckland before sailing for Sydney.