Sunday, 15 February 2015

Sunday 15/2/2015 – One sea day between South Pacific Islands to Fiji

Beautiful seas and skies, but so hot, best viewed from inside!  We haven’t felt inclined to be outside much today, apart from our essential walking after breakfast and dinner.  No swimming or hot-tubbing today, in fact there was even a decadent little afternoon nap in the cabin today.
Our quest to keep cool had also involved in-cabin telly, rewatching the captain’s slide show “life on the Bridge”, very informative and once again reminding us of how much there is to learn, and to stay mindful of what’s happening here and now, and not to take the work of the ship’s officers and crew for granted,  plus a documentary called “20 Feet from Stardom”, an insight into the work of Black American background singers over the last 50 years, all about Gospel roots, women’s issues, racial equality and much more.

Otherwise normal activities in air conditioned spaces like dance (today it was Samba) and art (a mountainous landscape) were comfortably achieved.  The landscape is quite complicated so we are going to take two sessions to finish.

Meal times are still just as interesting. I always start a new conversation as soon as someone says “Is anyone sitting here?”  There are a few retired nurses doing the whole circumnavigation. One of our table mates, Bea, is a nurse, and Bea incidentally only lives in Whitefield, then a lady we met at breakfast a few days ago who spent her nursing career at Pendlebury children’s hospital working with children with leukaemia, and today a former Barts nurse and midwife who later became a nurse manager in Southampton, who coincidentally knows someone from the Department of Health I remember doing a DANS when I was studying for my B.Nurs at Manchester in the early 1970’s. Some lovely unexpected yet vital nursey conversations.

Tomorrow we arrive in Suva in Fiji, we don’t have a tour booked this time, but Khachik has all the instructions he needs to find a haircut and we know that we won’t need a bus or taxi to get to the town centre, just a short walk from the port. We dearly hope that alongside visiting Paradise Island we can have some live chats with our loved ones tomorrow. Clocks go back one hour tonight so it might be possible.

Let’s see. Bye for now, time to get the black frock on for a formal dinner. xx 

No comments:

Post a Comment