Steve and Cathy's Blog

Now for sure I know it’s a Sea Day, and this is the unplanned one as were supposed to be on Nosy Be (pronounced No’ see Bay), Madagascar. The previous evening the captain announced the change in plans, and the Cruise Director declared that we were in a stepped up sanitation protocol as a couple of more cases of Acute Gastroenteritis (AG) had been reported. Since then, those had been the hot topics of conversation amongst

With the change in itinerary and getting almost a week behind on meeting my goal of sending a post for each day, I have somehow lost a Sea Day.  For all I can remember, the stuff I posted yesterday at Feb. 16th happened today, Feb. 17th.  However, I did find one photo taken on the 17th, and it was an interesting sunrise.  Do you see how hazy it seems?  That’s symbolic of my memory for this

As I am sure that anyone who reads this stuff will be grateful that we only have a few things to mention on the Sea Day.  The subjects will be breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Ha Ha.  Only kidding.  We have final overcome the urge to describe every morsel we eat, I promise. The three subjects are: Pirate drill, sanitation procedure ramp up and change in itinerary. Well, we find out today that we will enter another

We have been on the move since Cape Town, South Africa.  We are in need of some down time.  We figure that when we get to Maputo, Mozambique at 8:00am, all we have is a 2-hour walking tour of the city at 9:30 and we can call the rest Cathy and Steve’s Sea Day right at the dock.  Sounds like a plan. But the plan doesn’t quite work out.  On our way from Richards Bay to

This is one of the youngest towns in South Africa. While Sir Frederick Richards, for whom the town is named, established this as a makeshift port during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, it wasn’t much to see until 1965 when the South African government decided to build a deepsea port in 1965. Construction on the port began in 1972, was completed in 1976 along with a railway and an oil/gas pipeline connecting it to Johannesburg. Its

We awaken in our gorgeous room around 7:00. Cathy points out that a beautiful sunrise is in progress, and we take a couple of pictures. Then it’s time to get ready for the day and have breakfast. We eat a gourmet breakfast in sumptuous surroundings. There is everything possible available, and then some. Our waitperson Penny gives us the lowdown on the various stations at this endless buffet. Cathy, after asking our friend Kreg for additional

We awaken this morning around 6:30 well northeast of Kimberley … at least we hope we are, because we are to enter back into the real world today. We are scheduled to arrive in Pretoria at the Rovos Rail complex around noon, and we are hoping that this will happen, because we then must double back to Johannesburg by bus to the airport, where we then fly to Durban. The first view out the window tells

Cathy is wide awake at 6:00am, and Steve follows at 6:40. We both slept very well, but are aware that we made a couple of long stops somewhere during the night. We also climbed up out of the Western Cape from 477 meters in elevation to 959 meters through a coastal mountain range and along the enormous escarpment of the South African plateau. In order to accomplish that, we have gone through a mountain pass, as

More adventures at the Radisson Blu in Cape Town. The next morning we get up, turn on the shower, and there’s no hot water. Because of the Cape Town water crisis, we are very reluctant to leave the water running to see if it eventually warms up. We assume there isn’t any hot water. Down goes Steve to Reception (because the phone sill doesn’t work) to report this, but he can’t get the elevator to recognize

The excursion du jour is to the town of Stellenbosch, which is about fifty miles from Cape Town. The town is a center of the western Cape wine-producing region, which has 600-800 “wine estates,” so we can see that this is a huge industry in the area. This trip also gets us out of huge, wealthy Cape Town, and we will experience some of the suburbs of the city as we head along N2 (N stands