Steve and Cathy's Blog

Insignia had a Continental Breakfast at Oscars event that began at 6:00am in Insignia Lounge. From what we hear, attendance was as disappointing as was the television viewer numbers. Disappointing for Hollywood; not so much for America. It’s nice to be so far away from all of them. Our day was pretty quiet. The only thing of note, and it was pretty special, is that we were invited to have dinner with Captain Maroje Brajcic. Every

We arrive in Cochin (locally called Kochi) and join the cruise ship World Odyssey at the dock. Today’s adventure is called Tranquil Backwaters, and it is a day spent in the maze of canals in and around the town of Alleppey, a town about fifty miles south of the city. Our day begins with another Immigration face-to-face meeting and paperwork event in Horizons, which actually goes fairly quickly. Again our paperwork is checked two or three

We slide into Mangalore pretty much on time. Cathy and I are going on the Highlights of Mangalore excursion to get a taste of this very busy, industrial city. Cathy is looking out at the city from our veranda , and then spies about a dozen cows on the dock. Yes, cows. Hmmm. Before we continue, a word of caution about these posts: India is a huge, complex, diverse place. We will touch two cities in

Some Sea Days are more eventful than others, and today would qualify as eventful.  It started off quietly enough, what with sleeping in until 6:30 (!) and then having breakfast.  Our room steward Slahvy (I have no idea how to properly spell his nickname, but this is how it’s pronounced) needs an opportunity to make up our room, so we head down to Deck 4 to hang out.  We often wander around after breakfast to give

We have been heading for this archipelago of twenty-six atolls for three days, and for three days, the question has been “Will the ship stop there?” The country has been under a state of emergency since early February owing to a political crisis. If you look up the country’s political history since independence in 1965, you begin to see that this is business as usual. Their politics reads like the food fight from the movie Animal

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