at Sea
I’m not sure what time we pulled out of port last night but I know it wasn’t 9:15 as the captain had planned. Announcements were being made for a couple that still hadn’t had their passports stamped prior to leaving the country just before 9 pm. The captain did speak at noon and all I could understand was that he would not wait for anyone who was not on board at the given all aboard time.
Tomorrow we are scheduled to stop in Namibia. The city of Luderitz is the first stop. On our Africa trip in 2022, we had to bypass this port because of the high winds. It is a tender port and the captain has already warned us that it is a difficult stop. He is getting into port at 6 am because of this. I’m not sure how that will help things.
We do have 20 more days on the cruise but it is evident that it is coming to an end. The luggage forward service that we use has already given us notification of packing and shipping. I know from previous cruises that the laundry service will be stopped soon. The laundry service has been good and bad. Service is fast. In before 9 am, back by 6pm. Whatever machinery they use to wash is very hard on the clothes. Anything with elastic in it no longer has the same cling. Maybe this is intentional to help those that are constantly in line for ice cream. I’m going to dump many of my t shirts and socks. No elastic left in the socks and many holes in the t shirts. It is just the cost of cruising. No big loss.
We did group trivia after lunch but it Susie was the only other person on our team that showed. We still did rather well. What does a numismatic study? Who wrote the Brandenburg Concertos? Which city is Notre Dame located in? What is the official language in Iran? What year did the allies launch D-Day?
We had dinner with Janet and Brian to help celebrate Brian’s birthday. We shared photos and stories of our excursions of the past week. Talk of seeing the “big five” game animals is becoming a kind of competition. I know on our game drives, several of our fellow travelers wanted to see the big five over the 6 days we were gone. Then they wanted to see them in one day. Then it was a race to see them in one drive. I guess that is human nature. Everything becomes a competition. It was no longer “I saw them”, it was “look how many I saw”.
The evening entertainment was pianist Elio Rojas. Elio is formerly from Cuba and now lives in London. He presented a program of composers that have influenced him in his short 27 years of life. He did a bit of the March from the Nutcracker but then he broke into the NutRocker by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I haven’t heard that in years. He also did a mixture of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mambo no. 5. I guess since they both had the number 5 in them it was a good mixture. I enjoyed the show but I would have enjoyed it more if he just ripped through a set of great tunes. His English isn’t very good and his explanations of what he was trying to do weren’t very good either. Definitely a 10 on the keys but I gave the show an 8.…