To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. I may not have the wisdom of Solomon (or Pete Seeger) as elucidated in Ecclesiastes in the 10^th century BC but fate certainly impacted my purpose under the heaven recently. A bit pompous and presumptuous I know, but there are times when we face our mortality and come out the other side. What is the reason for this uncharacteristically spiritual intro to what is usually an irreverent decidedly unspiritual diatribe on this blog? Let me explain.

We left the good ship Azamara Journey on Saturday morning and made our way to Lisbon Airport. Our British Airways flight to London was delayed by 40 minutes but no problem because we had a two hour connection time for our Qantas flight to Singapore. At this stage it’s worth pointing out that the ticket was a Qantas ticket, not a British Airways ticket. The significance or otherwise of this is about to become obvious. Our Lisbon/London flight was further delayed by 20 minutes because we couldn’t fly over France – air traffic controllers strike. I could make jokes about this but the consequences were too serious.

We landed at Terminal 5 at Heathrow an hour late and the CB and I commenced our sprint across to Terminal 3. Our Qantas flight was leaving from Gate 1, the closest you would think. No it was the furthest away. The Departures board said “Gate Closing” so the race was on. We got there completely knackered and sweating profusely. The gate was still open but we were greeted with the news that BA had cancelled our tickets because the minimum connection time had been breached. You can imagine what happened next, especially when a handful of people who arrived after us were allowed to board.

To exacerbate the situation the Qantas staff were the epitome of indifference and arrogance. When told BA had cancelled our flights, I “politely” informed them we had Qantas tickets and BA had no right to cancel them. Take it up with BA was the response from Qantas. Fire up that computer and uncancel the tickets I said. Take it up with BA they said, because BA cancelled them. The rage was approaching Rambo proportions by this stage. When it became clear that we weren’t getting anywhere (we already knew they didn’t give a shit), we seethed our way back to the BA Service Desk at the other end of Terminal 3. You’d think the distance would have given us a chance to calm down. Instead the CB’s anger fed off my anger as we approached a perfect storm. 1+1 certainly did =3 in this case.

What made it worse was that I had been through similar situations in the past. I had been met getting off flights to be fast tracked to the next flight due to flight delays. The usual “do you know who I am” arguments also held no water – we were travelling biz class and I’m a life-time gold frequent flyer with Qantas. The least BA could have done was meet us off the Lisbon flight and give us the news then, rather than let us blow numerous gaskets getting to the Qantas boarding gate only to be told it was all in vain.

By the time we got to the service desk the BA people had already worn a tidal wave of abuse from another passenger in exactly the same situation as us. Cutting to the chase, I had banished the CB to a seat about 10m away lest she strangle someone and was waiting for my turn to get our new arrangements from BA when I dropped my boarding pass. On reflection, I decided I hadn’t dropped it, it had fallen from my left hand. I struggled to pick it up – my fingers were not cooperating. I picked it up with my right hand, stood up and addressed the BA lady as follows “kqergqeyurfgyrf”. This was rather disconcerting because I wasn’t aware I could speak in tongues, let alone Swahili. Then it hit me. Like a brick. I beckoned the CB with my right hand because my left arm was impersonating a French air traffic controller and when she arrived I said “jweiufhbdvdywgdstroke” through the right side of my mouth which was still sort of cooperating.

The CB leapt into action announcing an emergency to the whole terminal and demanding an ambulance. An hour later, after drifting in and out of incoherence and having been attended to by a para medic (who rode through the terminal on his bicycle), we set off for the best stroke hospital in London – Charing Cross. The best part of this whole episode was being in the back of an ambulance with sirens blaring and lights flashing, just for me.

As the ambos wheeled me into the hospital I could see a posse of white coated medical practitioners poised to climb all over me as I reached them. Seconds later one was shoving a needle into the back of my right hand another into the left and attaching both to tubes, one was shoving a needle into my arm to take blood another into my finger for a blood sugar test, one was ripping my shirt off, sticking electrodes on my chest and attaching wires to it, another was taking my blood pressure and I had a gizmo stuck on my finger. While all of this very well organized mayhem was going on another doctor was shouting at me “Ignore them and look at me. How many fingers am I holding up, what day is it….” and other questions to test how Joe Biden I was.

After the initial tests were conducted, within minutes of arriving, I was told they wanted to administer a new clot-busting stroke drug with a 35% chance of complete success, 60% chance of partial success, 4% chance of causing bleeding on the brain and a 1% chance of severe bleeding. I assumed this last one was a euphemism for something more final. We went for it and minutes later it was being pumped into my left hand. It needed to be injected within 4 hours of the stroke if it was to work. We beat that by hours. After a CT scan an ECG and an MRI the next day plus constant heart monitoring and assessment by various doctors, physiotherapists and occupational therapists it was decided the drug had worked exactly as it was supposed to and I was discharged Monday night, having been admitted late Saturday night.

I could have been discharged early Monday afternoon but the excellence of the NHS’s medical staff (“thankyou” seems infinitely insignificant) is not necessarily a reflection of the NHS’s administrative efficiency. I discovered this inefficiency is also inherent in other large organisations namely, British Airways and Heathrow Airport. When we left the airport on Saturday night in rather a hurry, we left our luggage in limbo. Getting it back was a saga in itself and a story for another day. Suffice to say the CB and I are now stuck in London because I can’t travel for two weeks. But flights have been rebooked, insurance has been sorted, accommodation is confirmed and luggage has been retrieved. We have a blue llama attached to one suitcase and a pineapple attached to the other. These were key according to the BA lady who went out of her way to find them.

This is your humble scribe reporting from Codger Cruises and today we’re going to cover some onboard stuff. Not onboard activities because I don’t consider bridge (the card game not the ship’s cockpit) an activity. It’s more of a passivity. Shuffleboard, bingo and even trivia competitions (I’ve lost my competitive edge) are off-limits also so I’ll cover a bunch of arbitrary and unrelated topics to give you a flavour of what it’s like on one of these floating gin palaces. Incidentally they make an excellent G&T and in respectably large glasses. I re-introduced the CB to this particular delicacy after a long gin-and-tonic free hiatus which wasn’t hard I have to admit.

While sipping our G&T’s, beers or wines we have been watching the band in our favourite bar at the front of the ship. We’ve sort of got to know them, having achieved “local” status at this particular bar. So the other night the ship was bouncing around more than it had in the previous more than two weeks, making it somewhat difficult for the musicians to perform and especially for the singer to keep his mouth near his microphone, like someone was turning the volume up and down as his head bobbed about. At the end of the set as he walked past he said it was time for a stiff drink – whiskey time. I asked him if I could make a request. Sure, he said. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald said. I really need that whiskey now, said he. Actually I’m surprised he didn’t want a rum being as they are from St Lucia in the Caribbean and they play with a distinct reggae beat. The running joke for the cruise has been that Red Red Wine is the worst song ever written so people keep requesting it.

Another down-side to rough seas is that people get sea-sick. I was explaining my disappointment to the cruise director that the only time I’ve seen a guitar on board, no one was playing it. He said someone was supposed to be playing it but apparently Serbia (for Serbian, the guitarist is) and Ghana were having a disagreement that prevented him getting on the ship. He caught up with us in the Canary Islands and promptly got sea-sick so no show.

The CB and I don’t actually mind when the ship’s bobbing about more than usual and we have to put on our wobbly boots. I may have previously mentioned the difficulties some of our fellow passengers have in moving from A to B, especially when there are steps and/or hills between A and B. Consequently it means the usual scrum at meal times becomes infinitely more civilized. But don’t try ordering room service when people are confined to barracks. It’s like ordering Uber Eats or Dominos at Grand Final or Super Bowl or FA Cup time.

The CB and I sat at one of the up-market bars onboard a couple of nights ago. I knew it was up-market because there was wood panelling, a grand piano (which someone was playing), no adjacent swimming pool and people covered up most of their wrinkles. It was like many up-market bars except for two things. First, the barman wasn’t ignoring me in favor of beautiful 20 somethings. I guess one of the reasons for this is that apart from the singers and dancers, there aren’t any. The second is that no one was paying for their drinks. The barmen must struggle when they venture out into the real world.

I worked underground a lot in my work-related youth and have spent my whole career in the mining industry. It’s a pretty hostile environment and safety is paramount to the point of obsession. So I’m always bemused by our devil-may-care attitude in everyday life. Like how close we are to speeding traffic when we stand on the side of a busy street. I was standing on our balcony a few nights back and looking down. It was a dark night and the water was over 4000m deep. The ship was travelling at around 16 knots and we were hundreds of mils from land. I was one steel railing away from the most unimaginably awful fate should I end up in the drink there and then. I needed a safety harness. At least during the day someone might see you go in. At night, forget it. And on that cheerful note, that’s it for #10.

There are five traffic lights in The Gambia (don’t forget the “The”). There are three times that number in my suburb. Admittedly The Gambia is not a very big country with less than 2 million people but there are less than 2 million people in the Greater Brisbane area, just to put this into some barely relatable context.

It’s not very big geographically either. The capital, Banjul, where we have just been, is very small – it has a population of less than 40,000. It’s definitely the capital because our guide helpfully pointed out the National Assembly building and the US Embassy is there. The reason our ship was able to park in Banjul is because it’s on the Gambia River. In fact the country is the Gambia River with a line drawn around it to include the north bank and the south bank. It’s almost like Senegal decided there were too many crocodiles in the river so they wanted to make it someone else’s problem. Consequently The Gambia is surrounded on three sides by Senegal and on one side by the Atlantic Ocean. It’s just another of those sovereign quirks like bits of Spain in North Africa and a piece of Russia surrounded by Lithuania and Poland.

Speaking of crocodiles there’s a crocodile farm in The Gambia which has been in the same family for over five centuries. Obviously the market for crocodile farms is somewhat restricted and certainly the number of potential buyers would appear to be thin on the ground, unlike the hundred or so crocodiles which lie about doing nothing, like so many council workers. And you would normally associate a petting zoo with cuddly and cute animals like bunny rabbits and puppies. That would be in the snowflake west. In The Gambia you pet crocodiles. And they don’t even want to lick you back. Call me suspicious but the one being subjected to constant stroking had blood on its face coming from fresh tooth holes after a recent crocodile spat but it didn’t eat anyone while we were there. Their rather non-crocodile-like behavior has something to do with feeding them fish rather than meat so they don’t have blood lust like the Australia Zoo crocs – wimps.

The Gambia is so small that there wasn’t enough room for all of the ship’s shore excursions so one had to go to Senegal. Everyone had to be back onboard by about 6.30pm so we could leave at 8.00pm. 8.00pm came and went and we were still about 100 passengers light. Could it be that Senegal was holding them hostage? Or were they victims of mañana. They had to return on a ferry and I don’t think the ferryman was maintaining a stopwatch accurate timetable. A bevvy of officers were nervously pacing on the dock like fathers waiting for their teenage daughters, no doubt considering the implications for their careers of losing significantly more than a handful of passengers.

Even worse they were all missing out on White Night which is the cruise’s big party night. Everyone dresses in white, gets pissed and makes fools of themselves. Maybe a grubby ferry on the Gambia River would have been a preferred option for some – who knows. It’s an opportunity for all of the various entertainers to get together and sing and dance for a couple of hours. And they do it with maximum aplomb and enthusiasm while we apply similar fervour to drinking. Two days at sea before Gran Canaria should be enough to shake the hangover.

On our cruises we try to get a cabin (sorry, stateroom) on the side of the ship closest to the land so as to get the best view. Thinking the boat would be meandering past majestic scenery I managed to get the last stateroom on the right side of the ship or starboard side, to be nautical. So far the only thing worth seeing on our side has been a pod of whales apparently but the CB and I didn’t see them. The coastline is somewhere over the horizon and has been all of the time we’ve been at sea apart from when we’ve pulled into ports. So lazing on the balcony, sipping pina coladas and waving to the locals as we glide past has had to be replaced by the occasional extra-curricular activity. Most of these have involved drinking including a blind wine-tasting.

I know that if you do enough wine tasting of the swirl, sniff, sip, swallow, spew (this last part is not mandatory) variety, you end up blind. Not this one however which involved identifying particular grape varieties. The answers were sav blanc, chardonnay, malbec and cabernet. My answers were verdelho (which was derisively laughed off by the adjudicator), sav blanc, shiraz and cabernet – one out of four. But then I did have a cold so the nose or sniff part of the process was removed from the equation. A shame really because being able to recognize the nuanced subtlety of the warmer south side of the hill in northern hemisphere dry grown rieslings is something I am particularly proud of.

While on the subject of drinking, a get-together of all of the Aussies was organized. Every cobber on the boat turned up – 32 in total. And it turns out I’m the only one of the 32 who’s still working. Embarrassing. The Canadians had organized a similar get-together the previous afternoon. No one turned up. Trudeau must have had them in lock-down.

 I’ve never been particularly religious – too much pragmatism and not enough faith in my largely scientific evidence based brain. Notwithstanding, I have no issues with those who are and I absolutely respect their right to worship whatever or whomever they like. But I was a bit peeved the other day when, after visiting the slave fort at Cape Coast in Ghana we were herded into a historic church, presumably to see historic churchy things. Instead we had been press-ganged into a church service. A truly unique experience and one scam I never expected from a fine upstanding organization like the Catholic Church, subjected as we all are to daily scams. That reminds me. I must check on my bitcoin investments which I must have set up when extremely pissed one day because I don’t remember doing it.

To finish off Ghana, they have the most belligerent speed bumps I have ever encountered. Most of our speed bumps you can drive over at a reasonable speed. These, which occur every few hundred metres in every village you pass through are the type that launch your vehicle into orbit if you hit them at more than 10km/hour and forget about your suspension when you return to earth.

We’re jumping around a bit here but I keep thinking of things and couldn’t be bothered going back and cutting and pasting into chronological order. So now we’re in Abidjan, the old capital of Ivory Coast or Cote d’Ivoire as the French call it. As previously mentioned the CB and I like to take in the local history but in this case we did a cultural tour. Talk about contrast. This cultural centre featured magnificent paintings and wooden sculptures with common themes – slavery and rape which were discussed in some horrific detail.

A few steps and 180 degrees away we watched a drumming and dancing demonstration that must have lasted 40 minutes. The enthusiasm and joy were palpable. And speed!! Remember Road Runner – legs going at 100 miles an hour and body stock still. It was like Riverdance on steroids turned up to warp speed except instead of dancing from the knees down in one spot, this was whirling dervish stuff, mostly from the hips down but with arms and legs flailing rhythmically in all directions. The beat was provided by traditional percussion instruments which were supplemented and complemented by a modern drum kit and a bass guitar. Just brilliant.

Incidentally, I love guitar music. There are two bands on this ship but not one guitar player (I don’t count bass guitar). There are three keyboard players, two bass players, two drummers and a couple of trumpeters. Last night we watched a cabaret called “Six Strings”. Now what do you think would figure in this? If you said guitar, go to the top of the class. But the only guitar in the show was one the dancers passed around while the singers sang “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. No one actually played it. And they did some of my favourite guitar based songs – Hotel California, Sweet Child Of Mine, Whole Lotta Love. I almost volunteered. Almost.

We just left Abidjan in the Ivory Coast and one thing has become clear. After Angola, Ghana and Ivory Coast I can say with absolute certainty that there are no buses with operating PA systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. More on this later but while on the subject of truisms, I had previously mentioned that cruisers can surround and decimate a buffet as quickly as Sitting Bull took out Custer’s 7^th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Similarly experienced cruisers always get the best seats on buses as the child bride and I can attest. Their positioning in the cabaret lounge where we get our riding instructions prior to disembarking for our shore excursions is strategic and cunning. And even though the herd moves at the pace of the slowest member (which in this situation matches the hour hand on your watch), the passageway to the gangway is only one American wide. So the ever respectful and courteous (“after-you”) CB and I always get the very back seat on the bus.

In theory we’ve had three to-and-from bus rides, one each in Angola, Ghana and Ivory Coast respectively. I say in theory because yesterday our full-size tourist bus in Ghana broke down. An hour later after waiting on the side of a completely non-descript road, replacement mini-buses arrived to complete the journey to the Cape Coast slave fort – an extremely interesting place with thousands of tragic stories. The CB and I found ourselves in one mini-bus with half of our previous bus-mates. The air conditioning didn’t work so for the return journey to the ship, the CB and I (well, me actually) decided to switch to the other bus. It was then that I realized all or our fellow passengers are aspergers. We occupied seats previously occupied by others. The people around us reacted like our cats do when we rearrange the furniture – the minutest of changes will just not do. Notice how on a bus trip everyone returns to the same seat after getting on and off. Not me. The CB whispered that maybe we should switch back to the other bus because we were being looked at like we had the plague. I, being a bit pissed off by this stage said “fuck em”.

Back to the PA systems. Tour guides by definition, should guide the tour with interesting and stimulating information, especially when on a history-based tour, as we tend to go for. In Angola we couldn’t work out much of what the young lady guide was saying so when we stopped at the military museum after passing the 18 rock (one for each province) monument built by the Cubans, I asked her about Cuban involvement in the civil war. She assured me that Angola had been absolutely at peace since independence in 1975. I guess she forgot about the civil war which continued until 2002. It was a very confusing situation but I think the communist backed coalition won so maybe that’s why they don’t mention the war. No one re-writes history like the communists.

Yesterday the dodgy PA’s were replaced by shouting guides in the much smaller buses after our unfortunate bus-mishap. Our aforementioned switch to an air conditioned bus (which was too cold according to one of us – sigh) meant we were also exposed to a one hour harangue from our guide who shouted a parenting-101 sermon. Who isn’t riveted by a discussion on what to do when young girls reach puberty when you’re on a historical tour taking in the slave trade in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The only riveting was to our seats as there was no escape. Oh for a bigger bus and a dodgy PA.

It’s very easy to be indolent in the extreme on these cruises especially when you’ve paid for all the booze you can absorb. On previous cruises we’ve rarely taken in the cabarets, either by not being there or, in my case, falling asleep during them no matter how loud the noise the performers have been making. This time we are not only pacing ourselves (three cabarets so far) due to the length of this cruise (3 weeks) but we are – gasp – exercising.

There’s a walking track around the opening over the pool deck so you can walk around and observe the pool inactivities below although to be fair, there’s more to look at in the open sea which is what a couple of the security guards were doing the other day. They were taking particular interest through the binoculars in a vessel which to the naked eye was a blob on the horizon. We hadn’t seen security on our previous walks and as we were off the coast of Angola, another African country with a small population of mega-rich and a huge population eking out a day-to-day existence. Could it be that some of them had taken to pirating? Hopefully, we’ll never know.

It’s a long way to come to see the Southern Cross but we hadn’t seen it for a while thanks to city lights – once in the last 6 years when we spent a couple of nights in Stanthorpe. But there it was pointing at the back of the boat. That’s the only time I’ve been on a boat and known we were heading in the right direction. My navigation skills would have seen my ship dropping off the edge of the world back in the 15^th century although luminaries like Columbus went looking for India and found the Caribbean so I’m in good company.

We crossed another country off our list yesterday with a trip round Luanda in Angola. And that trip was about the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like the President of the United States although if I’m a demented 80-year-old in later life I’ll closely resemble the current one.

No, cogniscence impairment aside, our presidential treatment was a police motorcycle leading our three bus convoy and an ambulance bringing up the rear. Ours was the first cruise ship in Luanda this year so the locals were going to make bloody sure there were no slip-ups. Maybe that’s why the pirates kept their distance.

They took our money in the markets instead when we were subjected to the inevitable bout of economic tourism. That’s okay though as we don’t mind paying the locals a bit over the odds for riotously colourful shirts and dresses depicting elephants and African dancing girls and other culturally appropriated images. It was a bit concerning however when, after buying a dress for what we thought was a reasonable price, the market ladies began whooping and dancing as we walked away. At that stage we weren’t sure what the exchange rate was between the kwanza and the US dollar. If its 500 kwanza to the dollar, we paid $10. If it was 50, as our tour guide indicated, we paid $100. Fortunately for us it’s 500 so Little D’s cute pink dress isn’t the Angolan version of a Versace, at least price-wise.

We’re now on our way to Ghana and have the next three days at sea. This’ll be the longest period I’ve spent away from land since 1963 and with the water being thousands of metres deep, it’s the longest I’ve spent above land putting a couple of 17 hour flights from London to Darwin and Dubai to Rio de Janeiro respectively, in the shade.

Some years ago, after many years living on acreage, the child bride and I decided to move into more manageable accommodation. She wanted to move into an apartment but I, despite my love-hate relationship with grass after spending years sitting on a ride-on mower, wanted a townhouse. I wanted to come down slowly from my grass addiction. The irony is that I eventually killed all of our townhouse grass when trying to kill the nut-grass in it. So, one re-landscaped garden later, we don’t have any now. Notwithstanding, I could not live in Walvis Bay in Namibia unless I could build my house on the rugby field which appears to be the only greenery here. The rest of the place seems to have been built on the beach which is at least 50 miles wide.

It’s no wonder there is a paucity of grass in this place. Our tour guide advised us they get on average half an inch of rain a year and a little while ago they had a 13 year drought. Now, I don’t know about you but to me, those seem like one and the same. Where we lived in New Guinea, we would get about 10 feet of rain every year so what’s half an inch between friends. But if half an inch is all you get and getting it is the difference between pleasure and pain, how do you feel if it doesn’t come? We need to get this discussion back onto the straight and narrow again, I feel.

Pretty much everything in Liverpool has a Beatles connection. Similarly this place’s claim to fame is huge piles of sand so the word “dune” is ubiquitous when it comes to streets, shopping centres, hotels etc. But as you go east and further into the desert (or up the beach), sand gives way to rocks. And they are folded and faulted and twisted and thrust hither and yon; a structural geologist’s paradise. A spectacular and spectacularly ugly Mad Max landscape where incidentally, the last Mad Max movie was made. The geology is metamorphic. The topography is Mordormorphic.

I’m a very ex-geologist but this sort of topography still makes what hair is left on the back of my neck, stand up. I am reminded of the relative timelessness of the geological process – we’re talking potentially hundreds of millions of years to produce the petrological mayhem here which puts the climate catastrophists’ end-of-world timetable countdown into the blink category. Are we down to 7 years now? I’ll need to call Al or Greta or AOC (no, not the Australian Olympic Committee, although these days their answer would probably be the same) or some other world famous climatologist.

We’re talking different things here but catastrophic change doesn’t happen overnight in nature other than very locally. None of us will live to see significant permanent change in any shape or form and you can take that to the bank. Allowing grifters, carpetbaggers and ideologues to tell you they can change nature overnight (and believing them) will result in them taking you to the cleaners vis-à-vis your bank account. If you don’t realise this is happening now, you’re not paying enough attention.

That’s Walvis Bay and Namibia done and dusted. Various orifices have been unclogged of sand and we are heading north again. Despite the fact we are in the tropics it is still somewhat chilly. Our Namibian tour guide said there was no way he would swim or surf in the Atlantic Ocean as the water is freezing which I guess explains the less than tropical breeze. Angola beckons.

This is our fourth Azamara cruise and I think I’ve finally worked out why the crew : clientele ratio is so high. Not many of the people on these cruises would be capable of climbing into a lifeboat (or out of a bath) unassisted if the Poseidon Adventure shit hits the tidal wave fan, so the more help the better. It is what it is. What can I say. Anyway, this ship won’t stray far from the coast although most of it would be rather inhospitable coast and I’m almost certain wading onto a remote beach isn’t one of the planned shore excursions.

Parodying our cruise-mates would be too easy and too cruel and the CB and I actually fall into a number of the categories I could highlight although I still reckon we are in the youngest 20 or so on the boat, not counting the staff. We’re not quite the Walking Dead but sailing on Saggy Elbows Cruises is definitely us. Paul Keating used to say don’t get between a premier and a bucket of money. He could have said don’t get between a pensioner and a free buffet with equal alacrity. When that great American stand-up Bill Burr said the best way to conserve the earth’s resources and reduce the planet’s population was to systematically take out cruise ships, I think I know which ones he was talking about.

We’re 40 or so miles from shore so it’s 360 degrees of horizon at present as we sail up the South African (or Namibian) coast. It’s also our first ocean cruise for a while so the wobbly boots are well and truly on and we find ourselves walking like shopping trolleys – facing the direction you want to go but veering off at a 30 degree angle. Better off sitting down and letting perfectly balanced waiters bring liquid refreshments at regular intervals.

It’s now day 3 and we are approaching Walvis Bay in Namibia. We have seen more dolphins in the last half hour than we ever saw at Seaworld and you don’t have to pay to see them  leap (is that what dolphins do?) out of the water apart from the cost of the cruise and airfares – cheap at twice the price.

The immigration people are getting on board right now and everyone who wants to get off (the boat) has to have a face-to-face meeting with an immigration officer. Very officious and official. Must be the German in them although at the end of the day it’s about dollars. I have never, apart from here, had to write on an immigration form how much money I expect to spend while I’m in their country. If you say none, does your visa application get rejected? I guess so. Not sure where we’ll spend it however because from here, where the Azamara Journey is tied up, it looks like Gilligan’s Island with a container terminal.

Two full days doesn’t do Cape Town and surrounds justice. But we gave it a go. The first day was mostly about geography. That got the walking and climbing out of the way as well as the almost vertical cable car trip up Table Mountain. The view from the bottom of the cable car was sensational and it just got better as we went up. Walking and climbing dispensed with, day two was all about wine. But first, a digression followed by day 1.

The first time we got in a lift in our hotel the power was cut. Their wind-mill must have stopped turning. The lift stopped abruptly and the lights went off. 20 or so seconds later the lights came on and we proceeded to our floor. It’s a bit of a shock but nothing like the shock of travelling up a mine shift at 30 mph. When the power cuts out here, momentum keeps the lift going up until gravity wins and it drops until the tension in the cables catapults the lift back up and so on, up and down in ever decreasing iterations until physics wins and you eventually stop. Unclenching then proceeds. When this happens, don’t be in the lower level of a two level lift with 90 people above you. Who says it doesn’t shower underground?

Back to geography. The Cape of Good Hope (nee Cape of Storms) is the point everyone knows about, well anyone who can read and occasionally exercises that skill. It’s the most south-west point on the African continent and there’s a sign to prove it. In other words it’s not the furthest south and it’s not the furthest west which doesn’t seem like anything to be particularly proud of. And Cape Point, a few kilometres from the Cape of Good Hope is not the place where the Atlantic Ocean officially meets the Indian Ocean. That’s a hundred or so kilometres away. But it is the place where the Atlantic Ocean current meets the Indian Ocean current. I know, I was confused too. But I was able to exhibit my encyclopaedic knowledge of primary school social studies when the guide quizzed us. Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco da Gama (explorer and bastard extrordinairre) and Emmanual the 1st anyone? And that last one isn’t the first movie in a soft porn series. Actually, maybe it is.

The wine areas are spectacular, even through the bottom of a glass and after four wineries, the eyes were getting somewhat glassy, like peeholes in the snow as my Mum used to say. But only if you swallow rather than spit. Unfortunately only one made port and it was the first so at the end we only had one bottle for balcony night-caps. The booze is free on these boats so no real damage.

We only had a handful of tour companions both days. In the short time we’re BFF’s only to never see each other again, some put themselves forward as worth writing about. Two American gay guys, one a genetics academic, the other a human rights lawyer with the ACLU were an interesting pair. I could have got into so much trouble just by asking a few questions so confined myself to asking the genetics guy how he reconciled X and Y chromosomes with numerous genders. He politely said it was a problem.

It’s been hard to reconcile the murder capital of Africa reputation Cape Town apparently has with what we saw and did. I guess we stuck to the well-worn tourist trails and CapeTown is a tourist magnet. To be sure we got off to a molestation-free start I booked a car from the airport to our hotel with an outfit that operates in many international airports. The driver warned us about checking child-locks in Ubers. That settled that. No Ubers.

We’re now underway on the cruise and what’s the first thing I read when we got to our “state room” (Azamara doesn’t have “cabins”)? Visa’s will be arranged at every stop provided you don’t have yellow fever and can prove it. FFS! After all of the aggravation I went through trying to do the right thing, the lazy pricks who did nothing expecting it would be done for them, were right. I better not give out this web address to any of our fellow cruisers while on board. We wouldn’t want them to think I’m putting them in that category. And I’ll be politely enquiring of Azamara why they ignored my two emails on the subject.

Most people who’ve flown with Singapore Airlines would agree it’s one of the better airlines if not the best. Their people know the difference between offering a service and being a servant (take note various western airlines, too many to mention), their planes are comfortable and clean, although like all airlines, if you travel up the back it helps if you’ve spent time as a battery hen. And the experience is only as good as the people around you. On the leg from Singapore to Cape Town the CB and I were in premium economy so there’s a bit more space and a bit more attention. But can someone tell me why, in the middle of the night, half way across the Indian Ocean, when half the people in our small three row cabin are trying to sleep (me included) and the other half are binge watching White Lotus (minus the naughty bits), the crew hands out bags of potato chips. It would have been quieter if they’d put bubble-wrap carpet down in the aisles.

It was a late start out of Singers because of the weather. I’m good with that. I’ve flown through typhoons and cyclones (same thing, just depends which part of the world you’re in) so if the captain thinks it’s worse than that, delay away.

Speaking of typhoons, it was grand final day in 1993 and I was on my way to Hong Kong. I got upgraded to first class so the trip was off to a flyer in more ways than one. I asked the cabin boss to ask the captain to keep us updated on the score which he duly did and the Broncos won, of course. I was sitting next to a St George supporter and by the time we got to Honkers I must have had two bottles of champagne in the bag so when we had to land (after a few attempts) in a typhoon, I was feeling no pain. Flying through, then over a cyclone in India between Vishakhapatnam and Madras in a rickety old Indian Airlines plane was an entirely different experience however.

Safety is also a rather significant item in the holiday’s strategic plan if travelling to South Africa. Our son helpfully advised us not to get car-jacked and our daughter also read about the country’s imminent collapse into chaos. I was somewhat heartened when waiting for our bags in the baggage hall. There were the usual lost luggage counters and foreign exchange rip-off booths. But there was also a booth I had never seen before, anywhere in an airport. It was simply called “Fire Arms”. I should have asked if they were checking those being brought in like Wyatt Earp did in Dodge City, or giving them back to the good burghers of SA who had inadvertently left them in their carry-on bags or selling them to nervous first-visitors.

I was reminded of the the airport’s Fire Arms shop or whatever it was, when driving round the more salubrious parts of town. Security signs are on private houses everywhere with some provided by professional security firms and others home-made but all are dazzlingly clear. Of all of the words written on these signs, as a would be miscreant you only needed to be cogniscent of two words which are ubiquitous vis-a-vis the signs and these are ” Armed Response”. Every other word is superfluous.

It’s now three days into the trip and we’ve been rather busy so the next entry will cover what we’ve been up to in fantastic (there’s a clue) Cape Town