Walvis Bay turned out to be a very nice port, even though we didn’t do very much except visit the mall and the Lagoon Waterfront. On a future visit we look forward to taking advantage of other opportunities. The outlook for our upcoming African ports wasn’t quite so rosy. We received a rather dire letter today from Capt. Mercer outlining the various precautions we should take when visiting our upcoming African ports: Luanda, Banjul, Dakar and Praia. You can read a copy of the letter here. After reading this letter, and listen to Barbara’s port talk, we were almost ready to hide in our cabin and never go ashore.
We are signed up for a HAL tour in Angola, but we have heard stories about even people on HAL tours getting hassled. We’re never sure about how old those reports are or if there are any other extenuating circumstances. Nevertheless, we will maintain extra vigilance when we are going ashore in the next several ports.
Coffee Chat
The guest for coffee chat this morning was Shiv Charan, the Executive Housekeeper. Shiv is in charge of all the cabin stewards as well as the laundry. One interesting tidbit was that he asked for and received six extra people for the laundry on the World Cruise because there are so many Four Star Mariners and above who get complementary laundry. Shiv hails from Delhi, India, and has been with Holland America for 10 years. He has been on other cruise lines since 1996 and on HAL ships for the last 10 years. Prior to cruise ships he worked ashore in hotels for 11 years.
Around the Ship
Judy went to knitting this morning and in the afternoon we both worked on editing pictures. I continued to work on some videos for the cruise director, Hamish. Hamish is putting together an end of cruise video and he was looking for videos of ship activities that I have shot; like the SailAway parties.
Dinner this evening had Sautéed Calf’s Liver with Apples and Pancetta as one of the choices. I’m not a big fan of liver and neither was anyone at our table. I know that some people enjoy liver and I tried to find out how many dishes of liver were served. No one was talking, and I couldn’t get the answer.
Jo Little
Jo Little was the guest entertainer in the Queens lounge this evening. She’s billed as a singer but she’s also a comedian. About half of her 45-minute show she tells jokes through the form of long stories. Then she sings songs the rest of the time. Her shows are very entertaining, even though it did take us by surprise as we were expecting 45 minutes of only singing. We learned later from talking with the HAL musicians that backed her up that her early show was different than her late show and that during rehearsal they only rehearsed the songs and not the half of the show that was jokes. This made them be on their toes since they weren’t quite sure when the songs would start and end.
