Steve and Cathy's Blog

We will start this post with a picture of the sunrise at 6:05am today.  These scenes never get old.

For the fifth time on this journey, we are crossing the equator, this time at around 10:00am today.  We are entering the Southern Hemisphere again and it is autumn.  Not that you would know it where we are now, but we will feel the effects of our southerly course in the next couple of weeks.

It’s been an interesting journey in a thousand ways, one of which is how quickly we have been going from season to season.  Three weeks ago, we were standing in the snow at the Great Wall north of Beijing at the beginning of Spring there.  In two weeks, we will be close to Sydney, Australia where it will be three weeks from the beginning of Winter there.

In the meantime, we are traveling right along the equator and will be cruising past some of the 13,466 islands that make up Indonesia, home to 266 million people, 60% of whom live on the island of Java which we will pass by tomorrow.  We will be visiting two islands that are completely out of the mainstream of Indonesia: Bali and Komodo.

So we will dispense with a discussion of Indonesian history and culture.  Not that we aren’t curious about this huge country that is over 3,000 miles long and 1,000 miles wide (obviously not one big landmass), but we are looking forward to the two places we are going with great anticipation.

Peter Croyle gives a fine lecture on Bali and Komodo at 10:00am, and Cathy attends a special lecture by Destination Services on those same subjects.  Steve spends the day writing these posts.

If I do not stop this stream-of-counciousness writing, I will never catch up, so this post is mercifully short and is ending.