Steve and Cathy's Blog

Last night, I believe that we crossed the equator again on our way from the Seychelles to the Maldives.  If you do such a thing in an airplane, the event is not even acknowledged.  Aboard ship, however, it is, often with great fanfare and fun.  It is customary to mark a person’s first crossing of the equator with a ceremony, and no one does it better than our Cruise Director Leslie Jon. Here is how he

Now before we say anything about this Sea Day, I just want to comment on the picture at the beginning of this post.  Every day, we send some photos to our grandchildren.  For several previous days, we have had the chance to share pictures of our game drives with them.  This photo shows Mikey, Sarah and Andy looking at one of the the ones we sent.  Daddy put the pictures up on their huge television so

It’s time to accelerate posting, and, with three Sea Days in a row, this is an opportunity.  Being days behind does nothing for the quality of these posts, and these days of shipboard stuff don’t make for interesting reading anyway. As this is our first cruise, we have nothing to compare our experience to, and perhaps those with more cruises under their respective belts can tell us differently, but I get the impression that the cruise

Up until recently, Cathy and Steve probably couldn’t find the Seychelles on a map. We can now, though, because we spent today here and had a great time. Mahe’ is the largest of 115 islands in this archipelago in the Indian Ocean. It was a French colony from 1742 to 1812, when the British took it over. Independence came in 1976. In true African form, there was a coup shortly after independence, and a one-party socialist

We are out in the Indian Ocean heading east for the second day in a row.  The Indian Ocean is the third-largest body of water in the world, and it covers about 20% of the earth’s surface.  It is huge, as we are beginning to understand.  Another world geography lesson for Steve and Cathy. The weather is beautiful.  The seas are quite tranquil, for which we are very grateful.  We are anxious to gain as many

Last night at 7:00pm, our ship Insignia left Mombasa. We will head due east for the next two days to cover the 1,080 miles to the Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands. We are leaving the continent of Africa behind, having made visits to eight countries. Granted, in the great scheme of things, this is the merest of introductions to the second-largest continent on earth that has fifty-four nations. We were taken on tours in air-conditioned

Another misleading title, as the ship spent the day in Mombasa as Cathy and I and about forty-five others flew in four small aircraft about an hour and fifteen minutes northwest of there to Amboseli National Park to spend the day on a game drive. Amboseli means “small tornado” in Swahili because indeed, there are many small, harmless, what we would call dust devils that arise out of the dust there. The park is 151 square

We arrive in Insignia Lounge right on time this morning at 8:30am, and it’s a good thing we did, as there are seven excursions heading out by 9:15. Ours, the Spice Tour, is an 8:45 departure, and will last four hours. We board Bus 31 and are greeted by our guide. He introduces himself this way: “My name is Wilton, but today, you may address me as Bus 31.” Now this is a good sign. A

The title of this post is misleading, because, while we indeed docked in this city of two-plus million, Cathy and Steve spent the day in the Selous Game Reserve, a 45-minute flight (in a 12-passenger aircraft) southwest of the city.   It is one of, if not the, largest game reserve on earth, covering an area of 19,000 square miles. Unfortunately, hunting is allowed on most of it, but the part we explored is reserved as a

The number of these Sea Days again gives us a sense of how big this planet really is. The distance between the last stop, Maputo, Mozambique, and our next stop, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is 1,393 miles (as the crow flies, so to speak). The distance from Portland, ME to Miami FL is 1,354 miles. No wonder the captain decided to cut out the stop in Madagascar because of the winds and currents. Today is another