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 15th 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.