Diane

Today I took another ‘highlights of’ tour: Highlights of Cochin. We visited a Jewish community, Mattancherry Palace, visited an art gallery featuring telepathic art(have no idea what that is!), saw the Chinese cantilevered fishing nets and took a short cruise thru the harbor.

At one point in the tour as we were walking on the street to the harbor cruise I felt like the pied piper. I had purchased something from a street vendor so all the vendors were following me asking me to purchase something.

At many of the places/countries we have visited on this cruise, the number ONE industry is tourism. Not only were they sick but they lost significant income during the COVID years. They have all said they are slowly recovering and were happy to see us. They get money from tourists from hotel stays(hotel & staff get money), transportation(drivers, mechanics, tour guides get money), food(grocery stores and restaurants and their staff get money) and from selling souvenirs(shop workers, souvenir makers get money).

We had to remove our shoes in the temples/churches we visited today- not for religious reasons but to preserve the old tile floors!

There were motorcycles all over the place- some carried 1 passenger and some carried more. The most I saw were 3 passengers. They also carried produce, lumber, pipes, sheet metal or whatever else needed transporting. Everyone drove motorcycles- young, old, men, women. Some wore helmets and some didn’t.

We had some rain today after we got back to the ship and were having our high tea.

Today we arrive at our first port in India. I took the Highlights of Mangalore tour and visited Gokarnanatha temple, an Artisan Village, St. Aloysius Chapel and the Belmont House.

The first thing I saw as we were leaving the port was a cow on the pier!

The Gokarnanatha temple was painted in gold paint and had many statues of Hindu gods and goddesses and a couple of cow statues.

On the way to the artisan village, we stopped at a pharmacy for a couple on board the bus- they wanted to buy cheap medicine. It was significantly cheaper then the cost in Canada where they live. I was OK with that except they bought every single pill the pharmacy had which means the locals would not be able to get any until the next shipment.

The artisan village had demonstrations of how folks historically made items such as coconut oil(using oxen), baskets(using reeds), cloth(made with loom controlled by hand & foot) and flattened rice

The catholic St. Aloysius Chapel has fresco painted walls painted by an Italian artist and is remarked to be like the Sistine Chapel. The ceiling isn’t fresco painting but rather oil on canvas. The chapel is surrounded by St. Aloysius College with it’s 14,000 students from Kindergarten to University age.

Belmont house is a private home that is still in use and lived in.

Today is a sea day and another time change. The time change is 30 minutes forward. Time changes actually go quite well other than we have no idea how far off we are from our home time. We can look up the home time quickly tho.

We are so close to the equator the sunrise and sunset are almost exactly 12 hours apart! I have a sunrise picture at 6:47am and a sunset picture at 6:33pm.

We had another country fair where each department mans a game booth. Some of the games are the same as prior country fairs and some are different. Passengers play for tickets that are entered into a raffle. If you do well in the game you get multiple tickets otherwise you get one for participating.

For the boutique booth, they bring out 10 or so items and you’re to guess the total amount it would be to purchase those items. I have never even gotten close to guessing the correct amount. When they look at my guess, they actually say ‘you’re not even close’!

Jennifer does quite well with the destinations game booth where they have 9 pictures and you guess the location of each picture. She got all correct today.

Neither Jennifer nor I have won a raffle prize yet- no matter how many tickets we have. The fun thing is we now know so many people on board, we know the folks who are winning!

ANSWERS:
1- St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City Rome Italy
2- Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg Russia
3- Teotihuacan, Mexico City Mexico
4- Château Frontenac, Quebec, Canada
5- Ephesus, Turkey
6- Moai statues, Easter Island
7- Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy France
8- Taj Mahal, Agra India
9- Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Japan

Unfortunately no snorkeling today. I just didn’t want to take a chance that it wouldn’t be as good as yesterday. Instead I took a tender into the pier/town and walked around to go shopping with a fellow cruise passenger. A gentleman helped us cross the street by making sure traffic stopped, then he took us to his shop. Kinda strange to follow a stranger into a building and up the back stairs not knowing where we were going. I didn’t end up buying anything in his shop and went back outside where another gentleman took us to his shop! All in all we were escorted to three of the four shops we visited. We did make purchases at most of the shops we visited.

On the way back to the tender, we stopped at the local fish market on the pier to see the stingrays. The stingrays eat the fish trimmings after the fishermen clean the fish.

Yesterday was Ramadan in Maldives so many of the shops were closed and there were very few people on the streets. It was a new experience for me to hear the bells ring for prayer.

What an amazing day today- we went to the island resort of Adaaran Vadoo to spend the day snorkeling. We took a tender to the dock and then another boat for a 30 minute ride to the resort. When we arrived at the resort, I asked about snorkeling and got a puzzled look but then they said I could rent snorkeling gear from ‘that building over there’. At ‘that building’ I rented a mask, snorkel and fins and asked about snorkeling. They pointed out a football sized area right off the beach that they said would be good but we had to say inside the area marked by buoys. If you went outside the buoys there was a strong current and many boats.

I wasn’t convinced that would be fun snorkeling and asked about day trips. The only one they had that got back in time for us to make it back to the ship included a hour boat ride, an hour snorkeling and an hour boat ride back plus it required 4 people in order to do the trip. I declined and was bummed that I’d be snorkeling in such a small area.

When I got into the water, and even before I put on my mask, I saw colorful fish! I snorkeled out to the buoys where there was a big drop off and even more colorful fish! I spent an hour and a half snorkeling, had a rest and lunch, came back and snorkeled over an hour more and then rested and did a final hour snorkeling before we had to leave. It was amazing- the best snorkeling I’ve done. The water wasn’t cold and it was so easy to just walk into the water from the beach. Just wonderful.

We had our Sing Out Loud concert today. We have been learning our songs on the sea days since the end of February. We sang seven(7) songs at the concert. It was lots of fun. Since I”m tall I get to stand in the back so there are no good photos of me.

On a non-related topic…. Sometimes a pier does not support a cruise ship- maybe it’s not big enough, there are too many other ships in port or the water isn’t deep enough. When this happens, the cruise ship will drop anchor further away and passengers/crew will take a tender to the pier. A tender is a small boat- usually the ship lifeboats- that is used to carry the passengers from the ship to the pier.

Our lifeboats hold 150 people but we usually have no more than 80 or so passengers/crew in them when it’s used as a tender. Sometimes there are only one or two passengers in a tender. More than one tender is used and the tenders go back and forth while we are the port. The passengers have to know what time the last tender leaves the pier. If you miss the last tender you can’t get back to the ship.

Moving from the ship to the tender can be a bit tricky if the seas are moving as both the ship and the tender are moving independently and you need to step from one to the other.

Because my ear was hurting, today I found a new spot on the ship- the medical center. The diagnosis was ear infection- not too surprising after the fun snorkeling a few days ago! A little antibiotics ear drops and I”m good as new.

I had a massage today just before I went to the medical center and when they took my blood pressure it was lower than it’s been for quite some time! Guess those massages really work.

We crossed the equator again today- this time from south to north.

A sea day to enjoy our champagne tasting and the cheesecake afternoon tea.

We moved a short distance during the night to our next port- La Digue, Seychelles. My excursion today is a Vallée de Mai Nature Walk. Vallée de Mai Nature Reserve is a UNESCO World Heritage site that is a palm forest with 6 species of endemic palm trees.

We took a tender to the pier, then a 30-minute ferry ride to another island- Praslin, Seychelles- where we got on a bus for a 30 minute ride to the nature preserve. We stopped along the way to see a beautiful beach and made another stop to see a waterfall. We just stopped on the edge of the road, got off the bus and walked on the road to see the waterfall. The guide keep telling us to watch out for the other vehicles.

We took a very, very short out & back walk in the nature preserve- I’d guess less than 1/4 mile. I was so tired- it wasn’t super hot but the extremely slow pace and the amount of time spent standing around made me feel like I was going to faint. When we walked back to the entrance at a normal pace I was no longer tired and felt fine. I talked with other folks that did the same tour but with a different guide and they did a much longer loop trail.

The palm forest was amazing- imagine a whole forest where the “trees” are all different species of palm trees.

The flagship palm is the Coco de Mer palm. It has the world’s largest and heaviest seed/nut which can weigh up to 90 pounds. We all wondered but the guide said no one has been hit by a nut/seed dropping from a Coco de Mer palm. There is a female plant and a male plant.

When we returned to the bus we were offered water that came from Vallée de Mai.

After we got back to the pier, I walked around the town looking for souvenirs but found lunch instead. I ate fish & chips and drank local beer and local cider at the Fish Trap restaurant on the beach. It was delicious and peaceful.

I went snorkeling, visited a botanical garden and then went on a second excursion around town today.

For the first excursion, we walked off the ship onto the pier and then boarded a catamaran which took us to the snorkeling spot. They provided the gear and I spent a more than an hour snorkeling and looking at the fish, vegetation and coral underwater. When I looked up, I couldn’t see anyone else in the water- apparently everyone else was already back on the catamaran. I did enjoy every last minute of snorkeling I squeezed out of our time there.

The most amazing part of the snorkeling was when a large school of fish swam by. I’ve never seen such a big school of fish while snorkeling.

From the catamaran, we took a dinghy to the beach where we boarded a bus which took us to a Le Jardin Du Roi- a spice garden where we saw spice plants, endemic plants and Seychelles giant tortoises.

I got back from the snorkeling excursion, changed my clothes and had 5 minutes to grab a sandwich for lunch before heading out on my second excursion.

For the second excursion, we drove around the northern part of the island to see another garden with more Seychelles giant tortoises, some beautiful beach & scenic views and spent some time at a beach with amazing white, soft sand.

One very odd thing about this island is that is is made from granite rocks. The inner Seychelles islands are made from granite and the outer islands/atolls are made from coral.