Day 31 Thursday 5.2.2015 Honolulu

Thursday  5/2/2015 Day 31 – Honolulu, O’ahu. Warm, windy, sunny, beautiful (and shocking)

We were both awake and sitting up in bed drinking coffee at 6 a.m. The clocks had gone back another hour (10 hours behind UK now) and we were both ready to go. At first we were just watching the reflections of the moon on the sea, then the dawn breaking, and then we just got up and walked our first 6 laps of the day before breakfast!

Soon it was time to get off the ship, unfortunately our first impression was shocking.  We started to walk and coming in the opposite direction was a young-ish woman wearing only a bikini, looking very pregnant.  As she got closer we could see that her abdomen was covered in huge abcesses and there was pus flowing out of one of them. She was really angry, and obviously very ill.  She raged at us about class and poverty and then walked away.  We were seriously stunned and had never in our dreams imagined Hawaii to be a place of such inequality, poverty, drug dependence, sickness.  We talked to each other for a while about the NHS, and our other privileges, but there's a lot of unresolved stuff, powerlessness to come to terms with.  

After a little while we headed for our whale watching lunch, which didn’t disappoint (yes we have pictures!),  even though I got a jolly good soaking and had to sit like lady muck drying off in the sun on the boat, wrapped in a fleece blanket.  Afterwards we walked towards the town. Everyone greets us with Aloha!

I have been in the hot tub for a while since we got back, great for my joints. It’s at the back of the open deck, music plays, people sit around the pools and tubs chatting and drinking. There’s a friendly atmosphere there too.  We have just had another 5 courser, but decided to give cabaret and dancing a miss as we are not surprisingly very very tired.  We are instead about to watch the sail away from our balcony. It’s after 10 p.m.

Overnight we are sailing to another Hawaiian island, Maui. We haven’t planned an excursion, so tomorrow will be a mystery, maybe just a wander around the vicinity of the port, that’s once we transfer ashore by tender – I do like tendering. Here’s one for my Ashtanga yoga friends, Maui is the home of David Williams and Nancy Gilgoff and I feel it’s special to be here. It’s a short trip so no time to find them to share an early morning Mysore style class. But I will be thinking about David, especially his and David Swenson’s anecdotes.

Hopefully there will be some free wi-fi tomorrow so we can chat, as there are 5 sea days after tomorrow, and that’s a long time to imagine being without good wi-fi  and personal contact. Whatever happens the creativity will begin again, and we will be perfecting our ballroom dances.

Bye for now, back after the mystery tour x

Day 22 Tuesday 27th January 2015 Whale watching in the Pacific Ocean

This morning we arrived in beautiful Cabo San Lucas between Mexico’s Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. We went ashore in tenders which felt very exciting as we got to feel the full effect of the waves, but only for about 10 minutes. These are the little lifeboats attached to the cruise ship underneath our balcony, and also on the starboard side.

 Once ashore we spent a sunny morning chatting first of all in person to the two entertainers from the last two nights in the Palladium – singer Peter Howarth (Hollies) and saxophonist Julian Smith (BGT’s runner up to Diversity and Susan Boyle).

Then we tried again with Skype to reach our “bairns” but made do with messenger as the wi-fi was, well, intermittent. For lunch we were off the ship so we had fish tacos with guacamole and salsa in a different restaurant.  Then came a two hour boat trip with refreshments and very satisfactory whale watching, particularly a family of hump backed whales

We got back to our cabin at around 5 after returning in the last tender for the sail away. We have started looking through our pictures short videos from the excursion. Hopefully we will soon find a piece of video that conveys all the joy of seeing these enormous creatures in the flesh! There were lots of sharp intakes of breath and ooooh, ahhhhh-ing going on. Quite emotional really. Very very grateful again today.

So today there were no art, dance or yoga classes and no deck walking on port days, but we now have another imaginary tick on the imaginary bucket list for “Whale watching on the Pacific!”

Tonight’s dinner was also a Mexican themed chilli with rice, beans and more guacamole – fiery hot and exceedingly satisfying. And in the theatre tonight Will Martin (link to a You tube clip) from New Zealand, described as “crossover” which I believe means combines classics and rock/pop vocals and piano.  He was very, very good. The standard of performances in the evenings is high now.

Bye for now.