Around the World. Week 12 Wrap Up

“There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as sampling messing about in boats. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else; or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular.” - Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

This week, there was an extra sea day than planned, so when I saw this quote in Speaker James’ Transatlantic book, it really resonated as I never am quite sure how we can do so much but also seemingly so little in a day. Also, time does seem to fly, especially when we literally skipped a day when we crossed over the International Date Line!

Subject

• Day 78 / March 24: Raiatea, French Polynesia

• Day 79 / March 25: At Sea

• Day 80 / March 26: Rarotonga, Cook Islands At Sea

• Day 81 / March 27: At Sea

• Day 82 / March 28: Pago Pago, American Samoa

• Non-Day / March 29: International Date Line

• Day 83 / March 30: Apia, Samoa

• Day 84 / March 31: At Sea

  
  

Day 78 - Raiatea, French Polynesia

Rain, rain, go away… don’t come back until after we leave…

So it rained again. Very much it is a either rain or shine situation as we move about the French Polynesia islands. It’s not like a light spring rain either. These are downpours followed by light showers and repeated.

Luckily, my planned excursion wasn’t until sunset, so there was time for the rain to clear up and hopefully, give us a magnificent, colorful sunset. I spent most of the morning at Baristas catching up on journaling and my February photo book. Yes, I fully realize that March is almost over and I’m behind on photo albums, but I’ve decided with all of my other documentation methods, it’s okay to let one lapse. Surprisingly, the photo portion of the book is done and I just need to fill in some text to tell what the photos are about. My cousin, Shannon, if she’s reading this, is likely surprised that I’m even adding text and not just showing photos, with no people… Apparently, I’m evolving. At least until I get so far behind that I default back to just adding photos. The really sad part is that I did most of the work ahead of even getting on the cruise ship, so the backgrounds and pages are already there. They just need to be filled in. Aye!

Okay, back to paradise, even if it was raining.

Eventually, the rain slowed enough that I was willing to go explore town. There was some amazing street art, including a massive sculpture of an octopus in the town roundabout. Additionally, there were tons of handmade markets and souvenir shops to be browsed. One thing I’ve learned is that we can bring fresh flowers back onboard the ship. I got to the flower shop too late so there wasn’t much left, but I’ll start looking for those options going forward. Ultimately, I bought a magnet and some earrings made from a pearl shell since pearls are so prevalent in this area.

Getting back to the ship, I decided to use the sunset cruise as a reason to get dressed up, because, you know, I find all kinds of reasons to do that these days. With my new earrings and a flower hair clip that I bought in Moorea, along with my sun-kissed tan, I apparently looked a bit like a Polynesian local, or so I was told. May have also been that I was the only single woman on the ship, but one of the guides (Steven) quickly became my new best friend. He happened to be the one who played the Ukulele and sang, so sitting next to me, I almost had my own personal serenading, except for the other 40 people onboard…

While we didn’t get a colorful sunset as we had hoped, one of the other guides, who’s name I didn’t catch since I only had eyes for Steven at that point or possibly I just couldn’t hear, gave us a fabulous fire show! We pulled up to this very tiny island where he got off the boat with a bucket of fuel and his fire stick. As we floated just offshore, he lit the baton, spinning it round and round. At one point, he light the sand and water on fire (on purpose), creating a really magical effect. Another thing he showed us was while lying on his back with his feet in the air, he balanced the ends of the stick, still on fire mind you, on the bottoms of his feet. After the show, the main guide, Tinny (see, I listen sometimes), explained that this guy was one of the top champions in their region, so it was an honor to see and experience this particular show. Definitely made up for the lack of sunset.

Oh yeah, good news is that plankton rash thing was completely cleared when I woke up. No redness or stinging or itchiness remained! Woohoo!!

Day 79 - At Sea

I’m sure I said this before, but time really is arbitrary on the ship at this point. With the different time zones and every changing port times, I’ve given up on having a consistent sleep schedule. Since I wasn’t feeling the best the night prior, I decided to have an alarm free day. So obviously, I woke up at 5:00 am.

By 8:00 am, I’d given up on any chance of catching up on sleep, so I headed to Baristas to finish the Segment 5 wrap up and pick away at that outstanding February phonebook. In my last week’s update, you may recall that my favorite barista off boarded in Papeete, so not only are we breaking in a new lot of passengers, but also a new barista. This may make me seem a bit old and cranky, but it was really, really nice to walk into the coffee shop, have my drinks waiting for me without having to order, and climb up into “my” seat. Today, I had to say words before being caffeinated and I had to try to sound not sleep deprived while explaining how the line worked and THEN I had to sit in a different seat. (For those of you reading this who saw me later that morning, I did move once "my" space was available. I did not as them to leave.)

Creating the Segment 5 Recap video took a bit longer than usual because we had done soooo much in that timeframe! With eleven (11) total sea days, there were a lot of Onboard Activities and Entertainers. Usually, I don’t create separate videos or posts for the Onboard stuff, so I use these recaps to capture all those details. If you haven’t seen what I’m talking about, those get posted on both Instagram and Facebook, but since they are about 3 minutes each, I cannot copy them into this format. (I’ve given up on fighting the internet on certain things…)

Once I had started the upload process, I headed back to my cabin for a rest.

Not wanting to spend the rest of the day cooped up, I forced myself back out into the public domain, heading to the latest Speaker Series about Captain James Cook. The speaker described all the different excursions that Cook lead through the South Pacific and Antarctica. There were a few surprising facts to learn - the first was on one of the islands, Cook and his crew were warmly welcomed with lots of food as the locals were hoping to eventually eat them (yes, to eat Cook and his crew) and the second, well, nothing else was as shocking as the cannibalism.

After the talk, I headed back to resume napping. Let me tell you, this nap was one of those Inception type naps where I was definitely taking a nap with in a nap. It was very confusing because at one point, when my alarm went off I felt like I was clawing my way back to reality and still wasn’t convinced I was fully awake. (I know I said alarm free day, but I wanted to go to the Captain’s Welcome Party.)

After getting dressed up (again), I headed upstairs to mix and mingle. As I’m typing this, I can’t recall if I met anyone new or just chatted with old timers, but either way, I’d seemed to be mostly recovered after that deep sleep, and was able to enjoy some Polynesian dinner at the Terrace!

I was a little uncertain as to what to expect for the evening entertainer, Benjamin Makisi, but I’m really glad that I went. He was fantastic! With training in opera and a background from New Zealand, he gave us a variety of songs across multiple continents. My favorite was the Donkey Serenade, but it definitely couldn’t compete with Steven’s version of Over the Rainbow.

I can’t believe how busy sea days are as I’m actually typing up this day at 1:00 am, but then again, time is arbitrary and my days are full of naps.

Day 80 - Rarotonga At Sea

Sleep when you can or hopefully at least a few hours a night. Anyway, the sun came up around 6 am today. I know this because I watched it, even though I had only fallen asleep a few hours prior. Shortly after watching the sunrise, I watched a massive storm squall move into our area.

Following that, the crew tried to get the tender into the water as the gusts of winds bounced it all about the ocean waves. As you can imagine where this is going, we heard the bing bong bells ring, indicating a general announcement coming up, during which the Captain informed us that not only was it unsafe to try to unload onto tenders at that time, but if we were to get to shore, there was a high chance that the weather would not allow us to get back to the cruise ship, so we were going to spend the day at sea.

With the sea day surprise, one of the new activities was coloring! The last time, if you remember, I tried coloring, the seas were pretty rough and sitting in Horizons lounge at the very top front of the ship caused a similar response in my stomach. This time, it was much better! Casey lead the session and introduced us to the new Wardrobe Manager, Natasha. We were able to sit and chat while coloring for a bit before dashing off to the next event.

For me, that was pool time! Once the Captain canceled the port day, he navigated the ship back out to sea and into better weather, so we got to see the SUN!! The full sun and not just part of the sun hidden behind layers of clouds. It was magnificent! And very hot… But I am definitely not complaining!

Next on the agenda was to learn a new card game with some fellow passengers. Anyone know Canasta? Well, I do! Many, many, many years ago, my family used to play a game called Hand and Foot. Apparently, they are basically the same game. (Post edit note: Google confirms Hand and Foot is a variation of Canasta). So anyways, my memory still works 20 years later as I picked up the rules fairly quickly. Not enough to win, but enough to take the “training wheels off” after the first round.

Given it was an unplanned sea day, the Culinary Center doesn’t have enough time to prep and create new cooking classes. Instead, Chef Karlis offered Knife Skill Demonstrations, where we watched as he explained the different chef knives, including which features of the knife should be considered when purchasing new ones. Although, I’ll admit that my last set of knives was a 10-year anniversary gift from my work, so I didn’t exactly have any customization choices at that time. He also showed different cutting methods, explaining that the names of the cuts actually started back during the Napoleon wars where French chefs created a shorthand to expedite kitchen activities.

After a coffee stop, I headed to get ready for the Solo Dinner, but as I closed my eyes for “just a few minutes”, I woke up after the dinner had started, so ended up getting pizza to go from Waves Grill and headed back to my cabin. This turned out to be a good decision because they were delivering the Excursions list for the new Singapore to Cape Town segment. Therefore, I spent the rest of the night researching the options, selecting my first and second choices to be ready to turn in the form as soon as we were able.

Apparently, once I engaged the planning portion of my brain, it was not quite ready to be done, so I spent another few hours looking at all the options on how to best use my Future Cruise Credit that we were given due to the Reroute on this cruise. The conditions are that we have to procure the cruise within the next 12 months with the travel being in the next 3 years. I was initially looking at January and February of 2027 in order to extend my Career Break a bit longer, but none of those options seemed to be making sense with the other plans I already have secured for the end of this year. I did find one that I might be able to fit in this year, surprisingly, so I’m waiting to hear from my travel agent at this time because it does require some replanning of the NCL cruises I’m scheduled to be on later this year. Fingers crossed this all works out and it was worth losing sleep over! (We gained an hour tonight and tomorrow is a sea day, so I really didn’t lose sleep, just postponed it a bit…)

Day 81 - At Sea

Time is arbitrary and sleep seems to be evasive. With all the planning the night prior, I didn’t end up falling asleep until after 2 am new time (3 am old time). Again, with this being a sea day, I didn’t think much of it because other than turning in my Excursion form at 9 am, there was no real rush to get up and get going. Well, as always, the sun came up, so I was awake at 6 am. Yes, I fully understand we have blackout curtains in our cabins, but I have found my days and mental health, even with the lack of sleep, are much better if I wake up when the sun comes up (and then, obviously, nap throughout the day).

Main mission for the morning was to turn in my Excursion form. If this wasn’t a lesson in letting my worries get the best of me at times, I don’t know what is. For weeks (possibly months at this point), I was really anxious about the process Oceania would follow to rebook excursions if the route officially changed to Africa. Once the reroute was confirmed, I went back through all of my pre-cruise prep work, which included researching all of the possible African ports and selecting excursions from their list of options on their website. Yes, I have a spreadsheet that listed out the ports with my primary excursion choice primed and ready to go, that is how absurd I am at times when it comes to being prepared. They call it pLANning for a reason (one of my nicknames is Lan…). Once we got the list of available excursions, I just needed to review my notes, make the selections on the form, and be ready to stand in line for hours and hours to turn it in. Or so I thought. What really happened is I walked up to the Destinations Services desk and handed in my form. That was it. Now I just have to wait to see if I am able to get my primary or secondary choices, so I headed back for more coffee!

For most of the morning and into the afternoon, I put on my technical hat, helping others with some of their photo / video projects, including teaching another iMovie class. I’m impressed as I see more and more of those popping up on Facebook and Instagram. Plus we are still learning new features of the program in every class!

Today's Speaker Series covered the life of author Robert Louis Stevenson, describing how this Scotsman came to live out the rest of his life in Samoa. This talk was timely as many of us have an excursion booked in a few days time to visit the house he built and lived in during his time on the island. The Speaker, James, described Stevenson's life was supposed to be designing lighthouses in Scotland, but given his health issues from a young age, resulted in him charting his own destiny in which he wrote of things from his imagination, ultimately influencing characters we still see today, such as the one-legged pirate.

The rest of the evening was as usual - Polo Grill followed by another phenomenal performance by Benjamin Makisi.

Day 82 - Pago Pago, American Samoa

My tour for the day took us across the island to the village of Fagasa, where we participated in a Ava (Welcoming) Ceremony. The host explained this ceremony is only performed for two reasons. The first is to honor a new chief who is receiving a new appointment and the second is to welcome guests to the island. Obviously, we were there for the second honor. During this ceremony the chief from Fagasa sits with the Princess and her Warriors across from the visiting Chief and the High Priestesses. They speak in parables in their native languages until the home Chief welcomes the visitors by sharing an Ava mixture that the Princess had prepared, signaling the newcomers are welcome in the Village.

For our specific ceremony, because we did not have our own Chief or High Priestesses, the Village provided a representative Chief (shown above) and then dubbed two of us as the High Priestess for the day. I was indeed one of the volunteers granted that honor, so for the remainder of the day, my name became High Priestess Tutuila. My main job was to sit quietly next to our Chief and then once the Ava was shared, I was required to consume it and shout a word that I’ve already forgotten. Easy peasy. Except they forgot to tell me that I needed to chug the entire contents of the bowl, which was quite full of a very earthy, like dirty well water in color, drink that left my mouth and tongue a bit tingly. The Ava is known for being having similar effects of alcohol if you drink enough of it. However, I’m pretty sure we got the very watered down version of the stuff, except the other volunteer and I were required to drink a bowl full, so we got the extra dose compared to others who just tried a small shot of it later that morning. Oh yes, after we completed the drinking part of the ceremony, the High Priestesses were required to dance with the Princess, Hulu-style. Never had I more regretted not taking part in the Polynesian dance classes on-board until I was in front of about 100+ people trying to remember some of the moves we saw at the recital. I survived though, so there’s that.

From there, we headed off to capture some photos of the beautiful shorelines. However, on our way, true to our experience in French Polynesia thus far, it started to rain. Again, not just a nice spring tropical shower, full on downpour, so our stop was very quick before we drove back to the markets by the ship. With the rain still ongoing, we took the buses back to the ship, a bit soaked by the time we got back onboard.

Once changed into dry clothes, I headed up to play Canasta again with the couple who are teaching me. At this point, I think they’ve realized that I used to play the game, again, a long, long time ago, and can no longer be considered a student of the game. However, in the first hand, we didn’t even count scores because I would have been so far behind, there was no chance of catching up, so I do still have some beginner perks!

After a quick nap, I realized we were leaving port a bit early, so I dashed up to the top decks to capture videos of the coast lines that were now visible since the rain had moved out of the area and the sun was setting behind the mountains.

The ship passed the International Date Line this evening, which means we completely skip March 29th. We will go to bed on March 28th and wake up on March 30th. In reality, the ship passed by the line sometime during dinner, so technically we had a few hours of March 29th before retiring for the evening. With that said, I completely understand why the ship did not coordinate a date change in the middle of a meal and instead just had us update our clocks over night, especially considering the whole Daylight Savings Time change debacle.

Day 83 - Apia, Samoa

I’ve debated about how to explain this situation, but ultimately, am going back to my initial plan of telling the good with the bad, so readers realize travel is not always sunshine and rainbows.

After going to bed a bit early the night prior, I was wide awake at midnight with my throat burning like I had swallowed a handful of fire ants. Thinking it was Strep, I headed to look for those certain little white spots or red stripes and found none. My next best guess was an allergic reaction of sorts to the Ava water from the Ceremony the day prior. I really didn’t think it was that because it was so delayed, but then I recalled the Malaria Pill episode. So there I was, taking some liquid DayQuil, trying to soothe my inflamed tonsils enough to go back to sleep. A few hours later, I was still tossing and turning, realizing that I was going to end up missing my excursion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s house in order to quarantine in case it was actually contagious, and let’s face it, I would not have enjoyed the tour or been much fun to be around, when I just wanted to eat ice and sorbet all day.

While on my DayQuil regiment, I constantly checked for fever or those telling markers of Strep, still not seeing anything except for swollen little tonsils and massaging sore lymph nodes. I’ve decided it’s not strep, but the beginnings of a cold. Bummer. Unfortunately, that means that I missed the Blue Horizon party for this segment, but luckily the next day is a Sea Day, so I have some time to recover before getting to the next port. Fingers crossed that it’s short lived.

Day 84

Well, confirmed it’s not strep, but did end up going to Medical to run the test since I was up most of the night again in quite a bit of pain. There is an infection in my throat, so I’m now on some medicine to clear it up. The good news is that I’m not contagious! Just feel like crap, so hibernating for another day or so. Thank goodness for Room Service and Sorbet of the Day!

Fingers crossed Week 13 has a few less medical issues than Weeks 11 and 12…