Phillipine Sea 14th April

Back to sea days, which are much more of a pleasant interlude now we’ve had some time ashore.

Before the day started we had a mobile signal. Only one bar if we were standing on the balcony, but still something. We couldn’t see land anywhere, though, didn’t even know what direction the land might be in. So it’s surprising how far it must travel.

The day itself was quiet – didn’t take a single photo. We went to a couple of quizzes (never scoring more than average), many meals, read ur books and in the afternoon watched a movie in our room. It was another black tie evening and then we went to a stage show before retiring.

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