Around the World in 365 Days: Across the Atlantic to Panama

Day 90, Jan. 15^th: It’s a great morning when you get to both sleep in and be up early at the same time. The ship changed the clocks back an hour, so even though we woke at what would have been 8:30, it was now only 7:30. I saw among the first flying fish of the cruise! Just one, and another lap around I saw a group of four. (One of the other passengers that I’ve played trivia with stated before I saw one – “Oh, we’re not in the right part of the sea for those yet”. Then I saw floating sargassum. Where there is sargassum, there are flying fish.) Guitar group was more organized today – it was a bit chaotic the last few sessions, but now we’re starting to look toward the talent show and maybe doing a concert in the atrium. So far, it looks like ‘What a Wonderful World’ (the “don’t know much about history” one), ‘Eight Days a Week’, ‘I’m a Believer’ and ‘Streets of London’. My strumming is getting much better, until I stop and think about it, and Bruce is starting to show me ways to “color” my playing and when it’s appropriate.

Days 91-94, Jan. 16-19: We’ve continued to have beautiful weather, with temperatures steadily increasing from the low 70’s to the mid-upper 80’s. The Observation Dome – where the guitar group meets, has become a hot box. The A/C has not been working – and it has lots of windows – aka “greenhouse”. I manage to sweat as much playing guitar as I do working out. It is also murder for guitar tuning, and we’re re-tuning at least once each session. Bruce decided we did not appreciate him enough and has dropped out formally – but will stop by “once in awhile”. Sometimes another very good guitarist named David also stops in, but he likes more rock than folk – so he’s also not a regular. John found an afternoon trivia team – Liam and Allen (different from Alan in guitar), John, myself, Stewart and his wife Lynn. Liam’s a nurse/social worker from the northern part of the country of Ireland, and his partner Allen is a Scotsman, and they currently live in Spain. Stewart and Lynn are from a town in north-central England that I don’t remember – I’m bad with names. We don’t do very well, but we get along and have a lot in common. Stewart and Lynn play casino card games with John. The casino has been fairly nice to me this week, and I’ve been playing up and down with the same “20 quid” for the last four days. After two weeks on board I found the hot sauce in the buffet, but they haven’t had any curries at lunch since I found the bottles. Our waiter in the main dining room brings John and I Tabasco sauce when we ask. We’ve been seeing Brown and Masked boobies swooping around the ship, going after flying fish and other prey the ship turns up with it’s size. Last night John found a storm petrel on the upper deck, caught in a groove of metal. The first two times he tossed it up – it turned back to the boat and hit the upper side. We left it alone for a bit and then came back, it was trying to climb the metal, this time we went to the other side of the ship where it could climb more to make it’s turn and it flew up and out over the side and into the dark night. At night there is a little too much light from the ship to see the Milky Way, but the stars are much brighter than at home. I’d forgotten how many stars made up Orion, for so many years I’d only seen the top couple, the middle three and three of the bottom ones. Venus is also showing up brighter and earlier each day. The choir is now working on the most complicated, convoluted version of “Let It Be” in existence. We did muddle through it, after many days of practice. In ongoing preparation for Burns night, they are teaching traditional Scottish dances, so I finally made it to a lesson after leaving choir practice at the official end time of 2PM, and not the normal of 2:15. Burns night, I have found out from my new Scottish friends, is a huge holiday, on January 25^th, celebrating the life of the poet Robert Burns (the poet that wrote “Auld Lang Syne”). Allen from trivia explained the ceremony where you “present the haggis” – which is brought out for everyone. The most senior of the Scots, in full regalia, then says a prayer to the haggis, then chops it up with a sword or large dagger. At some point, the gentlemen present a token of their affection to their lady.

Day 95, Jan. 20^th: Willemsted, Curaçao – unfortunately we had work to do, so not just a play day. John went through forms and scanned emails we had not been able to load on the boat. A scanned document we wasted hours and precious internet capacity on turned out to be junk mail. I tried three times to load the blog, but it kept telling me I was not connected to the internet via my phone, and I couldn’t reconnect the laptop. Hopefully by the time you read this, you will have already seen that blog post (Madeira). We wandered Willemsted after our work was done.

John heard about the market where the locals ate and shopped. The food in the market did not interest us much, but then we found the Ibiza BBQ on the edge of the tourist area – and we were the only tourists. They did steady business. For $14 US we enjoyed barbeque chicken with fries, ribs with fries and a beer each. My step counter had me at 16,454 steps on the day. The breeze helped keep the temperatures more tolerable on the sunny day in the tropics. We walked across the swing bridge, then on the way back took the ferry (just before they pulled up the gangplank) since the bridge was opening. The shop keeps and taxi drivers are not very aggressive, so walking the city is a pleasant experience, without being harassed as occurs frequently in the Caribbean.

Days 96/97, Jan. 21^st-22^nd: A sea day followed by Cartagena, Columbia. Historically, Cartagena de Indias (to distinguish it from the Cartagena in Spain). The city was founded in 1533, providing the main export site of Peruvian silver to the new world. Currently, it is the 5^th largest city in Columbia. Cartagena has a reputation – which since everyone knows someone that was robbed in the city, it’s not a place to wander on one’s own outside of the tourist areas, especially a female. Several of our friends, and Celia – who is a Columbian native, arranged for a city tour on a minibus for $10 each. The tour guide sort of spoke English, so Celia also served as our guide. I liked the statue of the shoes – erected due to a famous local poem about how wonderful a comfortable pair of old shoes are and how you don’t appreciate them until you start wearing new ones.

We took pictures outside the fort, for another $10 we could walk up the long ramp and tour the fort itself, but unlike in Curaçao, we did not have the benefit of a cooling breeze to moderate the steadily climbing temperature. The tour stopped in the city center, and finally found some familiar sites – up until this point nothing had looked familiar from our visit in 2011. The area near the port was completely different – in the last ten years there has been a building boom, with multiple high rises near the water. The associated traffic is also booming. We drank overpriced local beer at a city center restaurant with good password protected internet. I still couldn’t load the Madeira blog. On the way back, John and several of the group stopped at a mall, and I returned to the ship for a nap after being out in the heat.

Day 98, Jan. 23^rd: A cloudy morning made jogging a little easier, but the humidity felt like running wearing a blanket. The day brightened considerably with a rainbow in the distance and dolphins racing alongside the ship, you could see them swimming several feet below the surface, even though I was up on deck 14 for the morning run. Fellow passengers that point out when they see something interesting are the best, and this cruise seems to bring out a collegiality in others (except when in the laundry room, it’s dog-eat-dog in there). We reached Colon at noon.

Colon was established by the Panama railroad, then later provided the site for the army base to build the Panama Canal. There isn’t much to see to interest tourists– it’s one of the stops that most people take tours to Panama City ninety minutes away, or to Gatun Lake, created by the canal. The port area is small, with a strip mall nearby with café’s, two casinos (John’s siren song), and a super market – one of the largest we’d seen since Rotterdam (also, less expensive than Curaçao – I would have been better off waiting and buying my toiletries in Panama). The other plus – the official currency is American dollars. It started raining, so instead of walking the new waterfront park, John and I sat and had another local beer. The last time we were in Colon, almost ten years ago, it was not safe to walk around the port area. The immediate area has improved, but we did not go afield. If it follows the pattern of Cartagena, there will be condos along the waterfront in the next few years. As to the tours, I spoke with one of the two Jerry’s I now know on board – Jerry #1 we sit near in the theater for the performances – he’d been on the monkey tour. They took a small boat on Gatun Lake and saw howler monkeys, the capuchins would come down to the boats (if lured with bananas and peanuts) and hop around the roof of the boat, and a small, cat-sized monkey called a ti-ti.

My next post will discuss crossing the Panama canal, but will likely be over a week away. We are crossing the Pacific and have 9 days at sea.