Brazil & Caribbean 2019

We were awakened by the thrusters positioning the ship for its anchorage today in the George Town harbor which is our last port of call this trip before returning to Ft. Lauderdale on Sunday. Unlike two weeks earlier, today there was only an MSC ship anchored in the harbor. We ate a leisurely breakfast and made our way to the Ocean Bar which serves as the meeting point for the 4-5 star Mariners who can disembark the ship via tender without getting a tender ticket. It was a bit of a wait before we were called and told to follow a HAL employee to the aft elevator where we went down to A deck and boarded a shoreside provided double deck tender that held about 250 passengers. An unfortunate side effect of these large tenders is that it takes a while (an hour) to load them. When we were almost loaded, I saw the Captain come on the tender and approach his wife who was already on the tender. He passed her a wad of bills and she was definitely happy to receive the money. It was cute to w...

For those following my blog, the lemon tree is not dead on this cruise! Our wake up call was the sounds of thrusters and the reversing of direction as the Captain backed the Volendam into its berth at the cargo pier. The Carnival Sensation got the passenger berth pier. We took a HAL shore excursion to raft down the Martha Brea River. We heard good reports about it from passengers who did it when we docked in Falmouth a couple weeks ago. It's about an hour drive to the river launch location where we donned life jackets and boarded bamboo rafts with a raft captain. All of the rafts are under 6 months old and are built by their Captain. We saw lots of bamboo components awaiting their use in rafts. We were last to board and our Captain was Delroy. He was funny, sang to us, and had been doing this for 30 years. The Martha Brea River historically was used for floating bananas, coconut, sugar cane, and other products downriver in colonial days. The route was about 3 miles long a...

It was a short night after the NYE celebrations. The attendance at the 9am coffee chat with Jeff Peterson & Indy (his super cute dog) was a bit light. It was another interesting interview and there were lots of questions about magic and the use of a dog in the act. I do wish that Ian would start it exactly on time and not early. Ian then presented a brand new audio visual talk on Unexpected Heroes about how sports has been embraced by Caribbean countries. He used examples from Jamaica (bobsled), baseball (Dominican Republic), Cricket, and Trinidad-Tobago (soccer). It was really good. After a LIDO lunch with Larry, we attended Ian's repeat presentation on Offshore Banking and Crypto Currencies. Both of us felt that the presentation of crypto currencies was a bit shallow and ignored any presentation of risk. Afterwards I spent most of my free time watching New Year's Day Bowl games. It was a gala night and we dressed up to eat dinner in the Main Dining Room as it was fil...

We were the third ship to arrive at this repeat port for us which caused us to be about 20 minutes behind schedule. Ahead of us at the primo docking location was the Caribbean Princess and Explorer of the Seas. Later in the day a fourth ship, the Seabourn Odessy arrived and berthed ahead of us. Our berth location was at the former container port, designated as "I" on the port website. It's about a two ship length walk to the terminal and the port provided limited shuttle service. We elected to walk to the port exit and then across the street to the bus station where we met our hosts for the day, Catherine and Ronnie who live on Aruba and who we met on a cruise earlier this year. They drove us south past the airport and the refinery to Baby Beach at the south end of the island. It was a bit windy so we decided to head back north and ended up at Catalina Beach where we enjoyed some nice snorkeling in clear water and lots of fish. From there we retuned to their home fo...

For our second visit to Willemstad, we chose to take the little trolley tour of the Punda district as a HAL tour first thing in the morning. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and have someone fill you with information and trivia you might not discover on your own. This little Choo Choo train covered the old city in a nice way and we saw the homes of the wealthy early Jewish merchant settlers of the island along with a stop at the National Archives which is housed in a building nicknamed the "Wedding Cake". We had hoped to visit Fort Amsterdam at the end of the tour, but it was closed due to the protest held today by the oil refinery workers over the uncertainty of what's ahead for their jobs following the sale of the refinery and the embargo on oil from Venezuela. After the tour was over, we continued to walk the streets of this colorful city and enjoy the sights and sounds. We ate a quick lunch at McDonald's (the daily special which was a cheeseburger, fri...

It was another lazy sea day. Ian's coffee chat featured Naki Ataman, the terrific pianist. He's from Turkey and was a child prodigy, suffered an early mental breakdown, went on to earn a PhD in Psychology, and works with Autistic children when he's now performing concerts on ships (about 10 per year). Ian did the last world trivia of the decade this morning and a Mariner awards ceremony & luncheon followed. At 2pm Ian gave his pirate presentation and it's the best of his audio visual presentations. We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging and practicing bird photography.   We had a quick salad dinner in the Lido before attending the interdenominational service and then Naki Ataman's recital which received a full standing ovation! Afterwards, I tried photographing the moon with some limited success. We finished up our evening watching the SF/SEA Western Division championship game. Seattle lost 26-21, but it was a good game. We have two ...