Brazil & Caribbean 2019

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 ...

We woke up this morning with our ship being tied to the container port here in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Right behind us the Caribbean Princess arrived and tied up in front of us. We took a 3 hour HAL excursion out to the Caroni Bird Sanctuary. There were around 30 or so of us in a large flat bottomed boat powered by a 40-50 horse Yamaha motor. We saw a number of birds including Red Ibis (difficult to photograph), white & blue herons, pink flamingoes, and one mystery black bird. We also saw a sea boa, crabs, a caiman, and unidentified fish. It was a good tour, but I'd rather take it with fewer people in the boat. Back at the port we shopped at an excellent craft market where my wife bought a steel drum. Could she get into trouble with it? Hmm. . . We reboarded the ship to unload our backpacks for a lighter walking trip into the city.   The port required us to take a shuttle a ship's length to the terminal building (Princess Cruisers didn't need one). W...

This morning we docked at a new country for us. And what would our major activity of the day be? Snorkeling of course. Our HAL tour left at 9:30am and we were in the second group of 16 in a smaller bus and eventually a smaller boat. Our driver took us the scenic way to Pigeon Point Park where we boarded our glass bottomed boat captained by Captain Jack. He took us out to the Coral Gardens which were a nice display of coral in not very deep water. While there weren't as many fish today, the coral was pretty. We then had the opportunity to snorkel above the coral for a half hour or so. It was then a short ride over to the Nylon Pool, named that because of it's white color and the sand coral composition of the bottom. It's about 3 feet deep and the coral sand is used to exfoliate whatever floats your boat. It used it on my calloused feet. Then we went back to the beach and back to the port via the same route we came out on. There was much more traffic on the return t...

After two snorkel / catamaran trips that were a bust for the snorkeling, would our snorkeling trip in Barbados break the streak? I was having my doubts given the wind that we woke up to. We arrived at the port on time and the Scientology ship Freewinds was still tied up plus there was a TUI ship, the. Marella Exploration which is the former Noordam. Later the Caribbean Princess would tie up behind us. We were located in the same berth as a couple weeks ago. Our group formed up outside next to the large port terminal that is filled with lots of vendors. We were bused over to another side the port and signed our waivers and boarded the Tiami Catamaran Cruises catamaran. It was skippered by Lisa and there were 3 men assisting her. We motored out of the harbor and past the cruise ships to a location where there were two wrecks. The first was a former tourist boat and the second was a craft confiscated in a cocaine bust some 20 years ago.   From the moment we entered the water, ...

Christmas Day found us sleeping in until after 9am after staying up for the midnight interdenominational service. The day ended up being pretty relaxing with only two real events during the day. The first event was the appearance of Santa Claus on the World Stage where he gave gifts to each child under 17. Afterwards, adults and families had their pictures taken with Santa. The second event was in the afternoon: Ian's Christmas trivia which was a repeat of one from last cruise. I spent a lot of time photographing sea birds from deck 3 as they searched for flying fish food. It was challenging given the amount of movement of not only the birds but the ship. At dinner we were chatting with our server, Donna, about why there were so few people eating in the Lido. She noted it was pretty common for the shorter cruises. People want to experience the main dining room. The Jersey Tenors were the terrific evening entertainment. Afterwards we enjoyed Lisa and Wesley at Billboard Online ...

Christmas Eve 2019 found us in port at Philipsburg with 6 other ships: Msc Divina, Carnival Fascination, Zuiderdam, Marcella Discovery 2, Celebrity Reflection, and the Berlin. There are two piers here and six ships can dock here. The Berlin anchored in the harbor until the Divina left just after 2:30pm. Then it backed in.   For the second day in a row we went on a catamaran snorkeling and sailing excursion. There were nearly 90 on the catamaran with Golden Eagle Tours. The snorkeling was short and lousy. It was rough water and windy and they asked us after we got back on the catamaran whether we saw the cannon or helicopter or submarine. It would have been helpful to have known that before we went in the murky water. We then sailed to a white sand beach where we could swim to shore. It was a challenging swim in the current and wind. They then fed us some tasty ham and cheese sandwiches. Throughout the cruise, rum punch was pushed as well as beer. We drank Diet Coke. Afte...

The Caribbean is growing on us. We woke up just as the ship began its positioning maneuvers for the anchor position here at Cruz Bay. We used the ship's tenders to reach shore in about 15 minutes. For the tenders that we rode, the tenders bobbed up and down pretty significantly requiring great vigilance in boarding them from the ship and when returning to the ship. Since we had a HAL snorkeling / catamaran excursion, we met in the Ocean Bar and we were the second group called. Once at the pier, 40 of us boarded the large catamaran, The Dolphin, which was tied up next to the tender. In addition there were many. 'Taxis' (one ton American trucks with rows of seats in the back and a shade roof over all the seats). HAL seemed to have most of them contracted for. After a safety briefing, Captain Dave sailed us out past the Volendam to Turtle Cove where we would be snorkeling. I entered the water and immediately noticed that it was quite murky or cloudy. Later, when back...

It was another lazy day at sea on this last Sunday before Christmas. It was a spirited coffee chat with two members of the Jersey Tenors. Ian then gave his Writers of the Caribbean audio visual presentation. Since I skipped breakfast, we ate an earlier Lido lunch. After lunch Ian gave another audio visual presentation on rum in the Caribbean (we've seen this on the previous segment). At 3pm we were invited to the Sommelier wine tasting in the main dining room. The cellar master, John Paul, whom we've sailed with before did a very interesting session. Afterwards we spent time in the Crow's Nest watching some football and chatting with some ladies from Arizona. It was an interesting time at the interdenominational service where 3 of us were prepared to lead it. A retired Presbyterian theological teacher and his wife ended up leading the service. We learned that there will be a midnight Christmas Eve service, a 6pm Christmas Day service and a service next Sunday. We e...

Ah, lazy sea days after a rock and roll night in the Atlantic Ocean. We got up in time to attend Ian's 9:00am coffee chat with Chandler, the HAL entertainment coordinator whom we had already seen on the previous cruise. We were also able to connect in person with our cruising friend Larry and chat a bit. We skipped the 10am shore excursions presentation as we have booked all of our excursions, but attended Ian's presentation on the upcoming ports of call, all of them! The previous night we received duplicate tickets for our planned HAL shore excursions and triplicates for one excursion. So I returned to the Shore Excursion desk and asked if I could resell the tickets. A good laugh was had by all but I returned the extra tickets. I also pointed out a possible error for one of our excursions and ended up rebooking the excursion as the excursion booklet was wrong. At lunch we shared a table with Larry in the Lido and continued our conversation. After lunch we watched part of...

While the Volendam was first in port at its berth 19, it was really before 7 when a crew member eager to begin changeover activities opened the door to our darkened room and two sleepy bodies still in bed. Since we didn't have to vacate until 9am, we weren't in a hurry to get up. Besides we had to wait for the person presently in our new cabin 2679, 2 doors down the hall from 2673. We went to the Lido for breakfast and said goodbyes to a few people who were disembarking. We then returned to our room and noted our new room was open and our stateroom attendants, Chandra and Randi were ready for us to move our things. We didn't need it clean; we just wanted to store most of our stuff on the soda and in the safe. So we moved our things, and obtained new keycards for the new room and disembarked the ship as "in Transit" passengers. To our surprise, there was no US immigration inspection. For that I'm especially glad for our international passengers who endur...

Today we woke up to a wet and blustery Key West. Before we could go shore side, we had to go through a US Border Passport Inspection. The Feds came totally unprepared for the volume of people and changed HAL's announced process at the last minute turning it into free for all for the US Residents and incredibly long lines for the international travelers onboard. One person reportedly stood in line for 4 hours. What an embarrassment! Even sadder is that everyone will have go through it again tomorrow in Fort Lauderdale. After I went through the passport process in a half an hour, we ate breakfast before heading off the ship to find some batteries and Coke Zero. It was a bit wet, and we found a great deal on the Zero at Walgreens: $0.30/can compared to $2.50 per can on ge ship! We packed it back to the ship and headed back out to send some things home that we didn't need for the next segment.   After we sent our package at the nearby local post office, we ...

It was our last sea day and I think most got their fill of the motion of the ocean. But I'm getting ahead of myself. After our Interdenominational Discussion group, Ian's coffee chat was with the pianist for the ocean bar. Ian then premiered an audiovisual talk on 3 Characters from this part of the world: Jimmy Buffet, Ernest Hemmingway, and Ian Fleming. It was the best of all the presentations he's given. The Navigational Officer and the 3rd Engineer then gave a a Bridge and below decks A/V tour along with a Q&A session. After lunch Ian was back with Captain van de Hoeven for the Ask the Captain session. Many questions revolved around the Amazon grounding, and the Captain got a bit exasperated with the persistent questioning. As we passed around the west end of Cuba, we ran into winds and rain and heavy seas. It was cool to sit up in the Crow's Nest and watch waves approach the ship and have the ship crash down on them with a shudder.   We at...

As we sailed into the tendering harbor there were three other ships holding a position and we joined them. There was a Royal Caribbean ship Adventure of the Sea, Costa Luminosa, Carnival Legend. Later in the day the Carnival Vista would show up making a total of 5 ships in port with around 12,000 passengers ready to experience Grand Cayman. We got on the 2nd tender which was a double deck local tender and made our way to shore. There we joined the hordes in the confined but clean port area. The rest of our group came on the next tender about an hour later and we pointed Dan to the tour operators and he negotiated a $50/pp rate for the all day use of the van for the 12 of us using our agenda. Del, our driver, first took us to the Mastic Trail where we hoped to see birds and/or other wildlife. Several of us went about a mile down this twisty mangrove trail and we saw a few birds and heard a few more. The foliage provided a welcome shade from the sun. Probably the mo...

We were last here 2 years ago on Halloween on the Harmony of the Seas so we sorta knew what to expect. We didn't have anything planned so the night before I sent a message to Falmouth Historic Tours inquiring whether they might have a guide to lead us on a walking tour of the architecturally rich little town. To my surprise, I received a positive response via Facebook Messenger that a 9:30am 2 hour tour could be had. So I booked it. My 6:45am alarm stirred me out of a deep sleep as the ship glided towards the V shaped port. Having been here previously I knew the ship needed to rotate 180° and back in along the narrow dredged channel that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and the port authority created. And that's what the Volendam did, taking the eastern berth of the V shaped port. Another ship, Marabella Discovery 2 (former Anthem of the Seas) took the western berth around 3pm in the afternoon. It would complete a transatlantic cruise in Montego Bay tomorrow and would...

We're now down to our next to last sea day before the end of this leg of the cruise. After the typical Interdenominational Discussion Group, we attended Ian's coffee chat with the two members of Five O'Clock Somewhere (Andy & Tabitha). They coined the name without knowledge of the Alan Jackson / Jimmy Buffet song of the same name; and when they played their first gig before a US audience, they became fully enlightened. This group's genre is electronic pop rock. Afterwards I spent the morning updating my blog in the library which was loud with several majong games being played. After lunch Ian gave a canned talk on how and why Caribbean Islands are Centers for financial transactions and he tried to explain a bit about crypto currencies. The evening's entertainment was The Jersey Tenors which is a group we've seen many times on ships and it's probably our favorite group. There was only one of the quartet that we had previously seen with the...

Before 7am the Volendam sailed into the Willemstad harbor past the now open pedestrian floating bridge and under the Queen Juliana Bridge to the turnaround basin by the refinery. The Captain then sailed back out and moored just short of the Queen Emma Pontoon Bridge and across the channel from the yacht Tatoosh, built by Craig McCaw and now owned by the estate of Paul Allen. We joined a group led by Dan and we headed off the ship after 8am and found a taxi driver that would take us on a 5-6 hour tour west to visit a list of sights that we wanted to see. The cost was $50/pp. A little ways out of the city we stopped at a former plantation which is now the Tula Tuseum and listened to a presentation on early life on Curaçao. The gentleman presenter demonstrated a number of things about daily life for the Africa slaves brought here. From there we headed up to Shete Boka National Park where we enjoyed the sights of a rugged coast line and more lizards. Our driver even took us to a Natur...

One Meets the Nicest People on Cruise Ships Our ship arrived on time and was ready for passengers to disembark just before 8am. Interestingly, there was no mention of being unable to go ashore without showing evidence of yellow fever vaccination. We disembarked the ship just before 9am and made our way to the nearby bus terminal where we were to meet our friends, Ronnie and Catherine. Just after 9am, I spotted them across the parking lot and we went to their car to begin our morning together. We went up the west side of the island past all of the resorts and made a brief stop at one of their favorite beaches and walking paths. Further north we visited the California Lighthouse (named after a ship that wrecked near there). We noticed lots of small lizards scurrying their way around in and out of the bushes. We'd continue to see them throughout the day.   Next we visited the Casabari rock formation. It's an interesting rock formation in the middle of terrain that looks ver...

It was another relaxing sea day on our way to Aruba. After our typical morning Interdenominational Discussion Group, Ian's Coffee chat featured the band director who has been sailing on HAL since the 1990's. Today was our Mariner awards ceremony time (we didn't receive anything) followed by the Mariner's lunch which we shared with Jensen and Linda from Ottawa. The lunch menu was especially good! Afterwards, there was a wine tasting and chocolate time that was really good (but too much chocolate - not).   The remainder of our afternoon was spent relaxing. After our LIDO dinner, we attended the comedian's, Steven Scott, evening entertainment. He was among, if not the best comedian, we've seen on a ship. Clean, funny, and fully entertaining. We wrapped up the evening watching the movie, Brian Banks, about a fellow falsely accused and convicted of rape. He then successfully got his conviction overturned and was able to sign a contract with and play for t...

Barbados turned out to be much different in many pleasing ways than I originally expected. We sailed into the harbor leading the Celebrity Summit and took our mooring positions at the pier behind the Scientology ship, Freewinds. After Ian's 'The ship has been cleared . . .' message, our little group of 5 headed off the ship in search of adventure. The cruise terminal is a short pier walk from the ship (not so for the passengers on the Summit). We passed through the large terminal with its many shops and apparently good WIFI and eventually found a 15 passenger van where the company representative finally agreed to a partial day rate of $300 or $350 all day. We set the itinerary. Dan rounded up 4 more to join us so our group of 9 would only have to pay a maximum of about $40/pp. And off we went with Trevor our driver. We navigated through town passing by Rhianna's (pop singer) house and then up the west side of the island which is filled with resorts, beaches and lot...

Today was not a day to be outside. We had rain squalls and 9' seas through the day. After the interdenominational discussion, Ian's coffee chat featured Simon Tanner, Hotel Director. After having not seen him around the ship much for the past 20 days, I found that I rather enjoyed him. He spoke candidly about the grounding and tendering issues and said HAL paid $250,000 to the Amazon pilots association for the privilege of sailing up and down the Amazon. But he further said the two pilots on board when we grounded were blacklisted from ever sailing again on HAL. Finally, in a separate conversation he said the underwater diving inspection is scheduled for tomorrow in Barbados' clear waters. After lunch I went to a special 5 star Mariner America's Test Kitchen demonstration of making pasta from scratch. Then the passengers who took part in Brazilian cultural activities put on performances on the World Stage. There was dancing, drumming, and craft displays.   We got ...

The lemon tree was really trying to grow at Devil's Island this morning. Rain squalls and wind were present in full force and the Captain's announcements weren't especially encouraging about our ability to tender. The 9am start of tendering came and went. Finally a tender with the staff Captain and Hotel Director and port agent was sent ashore to assess the dock situation. At around 11am 4 & 5 star mariners were sent down to the tender platform and we were ashore in about ten minutes. Before recounting the time on 'Devil's Island', I need to clarify something. One does not actually visit Devil's Island. Devil's Island is one of three islands closely located together off French Guiana and its Space Port. The island we visited is called Royale Island and the third Island is called Joseph Island. From the time this former French penal colony started in the 1850's, prisoners were first brought to Royale Island. Hard core political prisoners ...

It was nice to have a sea day after Belem as lemon trees don't generally grow in the ocean! The schedule was laid back and relaxing. After the interdenominational discussion group the rest of the morning was spent at the King Neptune Ceremony which 'inducts' in a cute and messy way 'volunteers' from the crew who have never crossed the equator. After lunch my only activity was to attend a lecture on the history of Brazil by Rodrigo. Much of my other time was spent copying many of my Nikon Camera pictures to my iPhone using a wireless device called RavPower and software called FileHub Plus. This device and its software gives me the ability to move pictures or files between memory cards, USB sticks, and my iPhone at will. Doing it this way preserves the original file names and time/date data. We attended the 6pm Interdenominational Sunday service before eating a quick dinner before the evening entertainment which was a clean comedian from Scotland, Geoff Boyz, who...

After making lemonade yesterday, we woke up eager to do our scheduled city tour. Today's excursion would keep us close to the ship and give us opportunity to see local sights. Herman and his assistant, John, met us at the terminal and we walked out to the tour bus. Our first stop was the vegetable market where our main takeaway was how many Brazil nuts grow in pod. We walked over to a fish market and wrapped up our market tour with a visit to the craft market. Manaus was built on the fortunes of the rubber industry of the late 1800's, and our next visit was to the palatial house of one of the biggest of the rubber barons. After a bankruptcy following the collapse of the rubber industry, the house became a government office building. It now is a home to cultural events. We wrapped up our tour at the opera house or Teatro Amazonas which was completed in 1896. It's a spectacular structure and still in use today. After the tour concluded, I found a barber in the terminal...

There are a number of directions today's post could take. But my chosen path is to set the stage with a familiar expression which is repeating itself on this cruise. It's simply, when life gives you lemons, it's time to make lemonade. And today's post will be longer than most. Our day started with a leisurely breakfast as we weren't meeting with our Cruise Critic group until 8:45am near the Main Stage where Dan V had prearranged tender tickets for our group of 27. Just after nine we were ushered down to the tender deck where we boarded a local large tender, Jubilee which was later pulled from service. It was about a 15 minute ride to the dock and just as we arrived, a local boat cut us off from our docking position. So we bobbed in the water until an official waved off the offending captain, a HAL tender departed, and we tied up and disembarked our passengers. Later we learned that local traffic has priority over cruise ship tenders regardless of wh...