Subject: Report # 68 Sailing Towards Phu My, Vietnam March 8, 2016 Tuesday Partly cloudy & 84 degrees
Ah, finally a day at sea to catch up on two full days of photography and reports. We noticed that the dining room was not too full this morning, as we suspect many folks are sleeping in later than usual. It's not only the touring, but the heat and humidity that takes its toll on the folks. Unless you are used to that climate, it really zaps the energy.
After a leisurely breakfast, we took our usual morning walk only to find that lots of work was in progress on the lower promenade deck. And we mean noisy work, overhead across from one of the tender boats. Hammering, scraping, knocking off rust and old paint. In our early days of cruising, we always felt like a ship was being spruced up for future trips, but now we know that it is a continuous process to keep the ships operational and rust-free. The longer the trip, the more maintenance you will see. When the work gets heavy-duty, the crew will block the path, and we have to flip-flop our hike. Of course, we could always go to deck nine, and be in the open air and sun. Many of the cruise ships these days only have the upper deck to do a continuous walk or jog. So we don't complain.
Ship and boat traffic was abundant as we are sailing close to the coastline of Vietnam. Fishing is such a huge industry, it is done day and night. Our room has been lit up with the florescent lights on the small vessels. We believe that these lights attract the fish they catch. In many countries, that might not be legal, but here, it is customary. The bad thing is that we are seeing increasing garbage, like plastic bottles, shredded paper, and plastic bags continuously floating by. Must be coming from riverbanks that wash this trash out to sea. We have seen worse somewhere in Malaysia, but this is not good. Things made of Styrofoam never dissolve, staying forever in the sea.
We met Barb and Maureen for lunch in the dining room. Maureen has been the arts and crafts teacher on many of our world cruises. We got to know her much better last year, as she joined our table for dinner, while sailing as a passenger instead of instructor. She also lives in the SF bay area like us, and we have met her for lunch locally. She had decided to try the early dining for a change, but will come to our table when there is room, And perhaps some nights, join us for dessert and coffee. Anyway, at lunchtime, we have a table for four, so the conversation is much more personal. We ended up being the last to leave.
It took hours, like the rest of the afternoon, to sort through the huge amount of photos we took in two days. Many of these were taken from a moving bus that was bouncing due to the potholes in the roads. Good thing we have the option of deleting. If this had been 35mm film, it would have cost a fortune to develop. It is mind-boggling to us how fast photography has advanced from when we were young back in the 1950's.
We never made it to the pool, although it did look like a warm, pleasant day outside. It was a perfect time to gather information on the upcoming countries of Cambodia and Singapore. Personally, we can't wait for Singapore, one of our most favorite places in the world.
Life onboard continued with a talk from Kate Ross on the early history of the Khmer Empire and the ascent to modern day Cambodia. The other guest speaker was Revell Carr, who spoke about trade with Europe and the US with China, a very controversial subject these days.
Since sunset was around 5:54pm, we went to deck nine to see if we could get some photos. Never even took one picture, because the sun simply disappeared in the grey haze. We have yet to capture anything close to the fabulous Bali sunset. We did, however, speak to a new passenger who happens to hear us talk about safaris during our last sail away. He shared his many experiences on Indian and African safaris, and was very interested in our upcoming trip to Yala National Park in Sri Lanka. Come to think of it, we need to start organizing our things to take with us soon. We have brought malarial meds, which will need to be taken a few days before we leave. We will leave March 20th, which is coming sooner than we think. Hope the leopard sightings are as good as the tiger encounters in India last year.
Dinner found all of us back to share happenings of the day. All of us managed to do something different between going to the gym, trivia, attending talks, reading, walking, dance lessons, and arts and crafts or painting. We don't notice much gambling during the day, but at night it may be different. Some of our tablemates took the time to watch an old movie on TV….Indochine, almost 3 hours of dubbed subtitles. Gosh, it's hard enough watching subtitles on a big screen, let alone the small room TV's that need to be replaced. A better bet would be to go to the Wajang Theater and watch A Ballerina's Tale in comfort.
The menu was better this evening with many good choices. We ordered great appetizers of shrimp cocktail and soup, with the entrees of veal cordon bleu. When our plates arrived, it looked more like wienerschintzel, but wasn't. Obviously not a frozen product like we think it is sometimes, this was created from scratch in the kitchen. Speaking of kitchen, we had an invite to a special President's Club Galley Social on March 10th at 11am. Looking forward to it, because if it is the same as last year's tour, we had a blast. This will be our first official President's Club gathering of the cruise so far.
And the final news is that the dry cleaning facilities are back up and running. Not that we missed it, it's nice to know it is fixed.
Tomorrow's port will be up the river at Phu My, Vietnam. For us, it will be a sea day since we have been to Ho Chi Minh four different times and also to Vung Tau once. We noticed that tours were still available to the city, two or more hours drive away from the pier. They will even be available as stand-by tomorrow morning from 6:30 to 8am, telling us that not as many folks are booking with shore excursions as in the past. We wonder why??
By the way, if any of you have noticed a slight lack of enthusiasm, it is probably due to the fact that most all of these reports are written well into the wee hours of the late night. It's a small miracle that the facts and sentences make sense sometimes as fatigue sets in. And keep in mind that we don't always see things through rose-colored glasses….tell it like it is….that's our mission.
Bill & Mary Ann
