Osumi Kaikyo Strait 20th April

 Another sea day as we round the south end of Kyushu and head northwest to Korea. Apparently, port and shipping charges are much less in Korea and so the ship goes there regularly to collect supplies.

Anyway, this led to another very quiet day with no photos taken by me. Fortunately, while Lynn was still had some stomach pain in the morning it eased as the day progressed. I had the Japanese breakfast again today. It’s intended as a typical breakfast for the Japanese on board (though there are fewer on this leg as I think the southern islands are more interesting to them) but it seems well balanced and lighter than many of the western choices.

We then read in the lounge and went to the quiz – but couldn’t find a table, as the demographic has shifted and it’s suddenly very popular. Possibly also because it was very grey and drizzling all day, so nobody was outside. We sailed across a grey sea under a grey sky, which was actually quite appealing. We rarely see other ships, other than as we leave a port. Just the occasional bulk carrier or fishing boat. Anyway, it all led us to read in various lounges and in our cabin until lunch.

After lunch we slept, on account of eating too much, then watched a movie (I brought several). We have also solved the mystery of our champagne breakfast a couple of days ago; we bought a package accidentally a coupe of months ago. Which is to say Lynn looked into it, but they said we couldn’t pay for it with a multiple currency card. So she didn’t proceed, but they did and charged it to our multiple current currency card anyway. Hence our breakfast, and a couple of fluffy dressing gowns we have been given and don’t need.

Another formal night, so we had a very nice meal then went down to the ballroom and watched people dance and listened to the music.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hiroshima 24th April

Image
  Our last stop before getting back to Tokyo. And it was particularly loud and juddering from about 4 or 5am. Unfortunate as we had an early start, our tour leaving at 7.30, because the shiop was leaving about 4pm. I’m not sure why this was, our usual departure time has been around 6 or 7pm. Possibly because we have further to go to Tokyo? Anyway, our first stop was the Atomic Bomb Dome, the ruins of a building very near ground zero, and across the river from this the peace park and memorial. These were fine, and the larger scale and more open space was more pleasant than Nagasaki. Then we filed into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Similar to the one at Nagasaki, it was largely artifacts and accounts of the damage done at the time and subsequently, and some information on nuclear testing and disarmament since then. After this we went to Mirajima, which is on all the shops, though it’s properly Itsukushima island. This was a twenty minute drive east of the city centre and t...
Read more

East of Honshu 25th April

Image
  Our last sea day, and our last day on board. Unfortunately, this can mean only one thing… packing. Which should be fairly straightforward, as it’s just putting all our stuff back in the cases it came in. But it always seems quite time consuming. For a start, things have to be folded pretty tidily to fit in. Also on account of accidentally buying some sort of package, we have two fluffy dressing gowns to fit in. Not heavy, but unavoidably bulky. Before I make all of this sound too difficult I should admit that I was only the assistant here. There needs to be some sort of planning or system, and you can’t have two people in charge, so I’m not. Thus it meant performing a range of menial tasks (folding, threading, carrying) and then sitting down and returning to my book. In between spurts of packing we read, and went to meals. We also had two half-bottles of champagne and the remains of a bottle of gin to finish. Which was relatively late in the day and so didn’t impede our perfo...
Read more

At Sea 23rd April

Image
  A sea day, which means nothing much happened. Also because we were particularly unmotivated to do more than read and wander about. We’ve been travelling up the east coast of Kyushu Island, which has meant intermittent internet signal – and that has meant I can see where we are. We have been travelling quite slowly, only about 11 knots, around half our cruising spped so apparently there’s no hurry. After breakfast we were here:                                           It was hard to get a fix late in the day, when the coast curved away from us and I lost signal, but in the evening we were towards the northern end of the coast and were turning northwest towards Hiroshima. Otherwise we really did nothing – ate, read, slept.
Read more