Showing posts with label East China Sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label East China Sea. Show all posts

Saturday, 14 March 2015

Friday 13/3/2015 Day 66 Sea Day 1 of 2 Shanghai to Hong Kong

We don’t have our passports at the moment because the ship’s officers collected them after Sydney for the ease of organising the group visas for Indonesia, Borneo and the Phillipines.  We do however have a bar coded cruise card with photo and all our details on it, and each country issues different documents – Indonesia and the Phillipines for China we also have to carry a photocopy of the passport on a sheet of paper with a bar code on it which when read at immigration produced our passport and photo on screen, with multiple entry Chinese visa.

Sector four of our grand voyage will be starting when we arrive in Hong Kong.  This sector takes in Sanya on Hainan Island and then we leave China for Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore and the Malaysian Peninsular.  We have full day excursions booked until Thailand.  Then we get our passports back.

After Port Kelang the cruise then sails up the west side on the Indian Ocean on to Mumbai, then on to Abu Dhabi, but we will instead be enjoying our own adventure from Port Kelang to Abu Dhabi via the Siam Care Biannual Seminar and Family Camp in Bangkok. We are staying in Bangkok for 7 nights and then flying to Abu Dhabi on 2/4/2015, rejoining the ship for the fifth and final sector.  This means we will miss Mumbai and 6 sea days (i.e. 6 art lessons!).  We must ask Easa if we can take some art homework with us to Thailand!  So all in all we are delighted to have found this impromptu way to be both on the world cruise AND at the Siam Care Seminar J.  I hadn’t missed one since 2002, so we are both thrilled at the way it has worked out.  This has all been organised while we have been on the ship and since we left the UK, for this we would like to thank Gary Manners.

Today we have been sailing back down the East China Sea, a comparatively busy stretch of sea where we’ve see so many fishing vessels, freight ships, cruise liners on both sides of ours, more signs of activity than any other ocean so far.  The sea has been really peaceful and smooth with a very beautiful pale turquoise colour.  The clouds have all disappeared and the air temperature is rising up again to 15C today, predicted to be 18C in Hong Kong and then after Sanya entering the tropics again.  Khachik and I have had our winter coats on for the deck walking today, but still only 6 laps, so we finished off in the relative comfort of the gym using headphones so we could be entertained at the same time. We tread-milled, arm-cycled and recumbent cycled for an hour before my yoga practice.  Good work!  The gym is on deck 9 at the front of the ship and the treadmills are positioned so that you get a panoramic view of the sea in the direction we are sailing.  It’s awesome.
After all that virtuous activity we broke the mould after coffee and went to listened to a talk by Bernard Purrier in the Palladium about whales, dolphins and porpoises and the many theories about Cetacean strandings.  This was fascinating, really informative and immediately raising our awareness of how little we know about so much.  We missed the first 2 of these as they clashed with other things, but I would like to hear the last about the future of the world’s fish in a talk called “Empty Seas, Empty Nets?” 

Some talks do end up on the telly in our cabins for example the music talks Chris Walker has been doing about some favourite performers from the last century.  At the moment there’s a talk about Frank Sinatra on a loop.

Anyway, to get back to our sea day activities – the whale talk, lunch, a look at excursions, crosswords and art (challenging watercolour of a leopard!), dinner (another chance to choose from Marco Pierre White’s special menu) , and back “home” in the cabin. The excitement builds at the end of each sector.

















Tomorrow is our end of sector art exhibition, and the culmination concert for the Arcadia Vocalists.  The talent shows and strictly come dancing competitions happened today.  So I will say bye for now, and will be back here about this time again tomorrow. xx