Red Wine Express

Some things here are not quite as they seem. The bar in this hotel is my type of authentic – wood panelling, leather chairs, red carpet, soft music and lighting and very few people. Don’t get me wrong; I love loud music but there’s a time and a place. Last night was perfect until 12 Americans turned up and immediately implemented a talking competition. Before announcing who I thought the winner was and suggesting they take a well-earned break after some intensive participation, we withdrew lest a diplomatic incident ensue.

But back to the original subject. 0n arriving in said bar and after perusing the drinks menu, I ordered two beers – a Stella for me and a Heineken for the CB. Now there’s not much slight of hand to be achieved with Heineken other than perhaps a sly spelling switch of the e and i. Notwithstanding errant typos, a Heineken is a Heineken wherever you are. But regarding Stella, those of you with even a peripheral understanding of the beer world will have noticed that there’s a word missing. Stella is in fact Stella Artois, the famous Belgian sharp, crisp, ice-cold drop which slaked many a Thursday afternoon thirst after golf until my club infamously stopped stocking it. I still haven’t forgiven them for that. This Stella’s imposter status was obvious as it approached, perched on the immaculately liveried waiter’s tray. The label was not red and white. It was yellow and blue. Gasp!! And it said “Authentic Egyptian lager”. I’d have been really peeved if it hadn’t been so good.

The CB and I have decided that sight-seeing is best done in this part of the world with a guide and security as discussed in The Dry Argument #1. We got back to the hotel this afternoon after a pretty full day and decided that rather than go for a walk and possibly risk, well, let’s leave it there, we’d observe the very popular park and square next to our hotel on one side and the ocean on another from the relative safety of the bar. As if to justify our decision, just now numerous police cars and ambulances with lights flashing and sirens blaring have edged past the hotel. Traffic moves for no one in this place. To us it looked like Armageddon. To the two guys running the bar – meh. Maybe the coppers and ambos were going home for dinner and were time constrained.

So far this post has been consistent with the theme suggested by the title (in a satirical way because this is hardly dry) with the hotel bar figuring prominently, despite my pathetic attempt in the Prologue to deflect. And I just thought of the most ridiculous answer to a question I am yet to determine for that silly quiz show Jeopardy, where the answers are questions. In this case it’s “What is a Middle East pub crawl?”

Let’s change the subject….sort of. While considering things that begin with “b”, how about beds. There are 9 people on the Alexandria excursion – 4 couples and one single. Our guide went to great pains to establish who wanted a double room and who wanted a single as we approached Alexandria. This information was then conveyed to the hotel. With only 5 choices and four of them being the same, the margin for error was up there with Donald Trump losing the 2020 presidential election. So the CB and I got two single beds and Bill from Sydney did a Biden and got our double (I’m surmising) without even trying. After 19 hours of flying and two connections then a long day in the Egyptian sun, supplemented by some Egyptian wine – yes they do – which is not preserved with anti-freeze, absolutely not, we are ready for any flat surface. To sleep on. Proximity will not be an issue tonight.

As the child bride and I get closer to Cairo, the frequency of Australian accents becomes valuable currency. If this trip is to end in tears, we want to be able to spread them around rather than be the only two infidels at the riot. We have just found out there are 9 on our extra trip to Alexandria and the full complement of 40 for the rest of the trip. How’s that for steadfastness in the face of rather challenging circumstances. If we all lived in New Hampshire in the USA we’d have their state motto tatooed on our foreheads – “live free or die”.

Speaking of challenging, wifi isn’t working as I write this in our room in Alexandria’s delightfully dated Steigenberger Cecil Hotel, built in 1936 I believe. The child bride and I shall be heading to the bar shortly because it’s a dry….you know the rest. Besides, there’s bugger-all on the 83 TV channels. TV in the Steigenberger consists of the BBC, CNN, numerous channels beginning with Al, lots of European channels (excluding the UK) and a documentary showing a re-run of 1973’s Yom Kippur war with a surprise ending.

We’ve now moved onto the first day-proper of this tour of duty and have already done a few things where you stand back, take in the full majesty or significance of what’s spread out before you, and say to each other, “this is why we came here”. We did it as the sun came up over the Anapurnas in Nepal. Here it was the Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa and/or Pompey’s Pillar, take your pick. In respect of the latter, its historical significance and its imposing presence should not be diminished by the murder there of two Jewish tourists and their guide by a terrorist policeman on Sunday, four days ago. You wouldn’t know now because we walked through the same area where this atrocity occurred. But outside, as we left in the bus, the security presence was palpable. I didn’t notice when we arrived but we were early. Maybe they only work banker’s hours.

Speaking of security, we have our own. Despite not noticing the full extent of the security presence as we arrived at the various attractions, I had noticed quite a few young, fit looking grey suited gentlemen in addition to those wearing uniforms and bullet-proof vests and carrying automatic weapons. We had one of these grey-suited gentlemen on our bus (as did others, I assume) and he accompanied us to and from and around. He had an easily identifiable bulge on his hip under his jacket also. I’m not sure if his presence makes me feel better or worse – he’ll be with us tomorrow when we go to El Alamein. Concealed carry is a controversial subject in the USA. I’m pretty okay with it here as long as the concealment is in my favour.

If we can now take this discussion in the complete opposite direction, something rather pleasant and amusing was happening to us all as we made our tortuous way through streets made by people who never in their wildest dreams imagined a full-size passenger bus. Our driver managed u turns in places where I wouldn’t drive a shopping trolley. So slow was it that we would have been able to discuss the weather (let’s keep it non-controversial, remembering where we are) with passers-by if we could wind the windows down. No, these people were all smiling at us and waving to us – kids going to school, vendors sitting outside their shops smoking durries, old blokes watching the world go by as they sat drinking coffee. How nice I thought as we all waved back. But later, in keeping with the times I thought “do they know something we don’t?” Shame, really.

Well the CB and I are on the road again. But only just. We’ve had a somewhat chequered history with the travel company organising this tour. In 2020 we tried to spend a month in South America with them, then covid struck and it was adios amigos. Last October 2022 we had a three week trip round Japan and Korea lined up but the Japanese still weren’t on board with the various covid conspiracy theories doing the rounds on twitter. They still thought that mask mandates worked and vaccines prevented catching and passing-on the nasty, spiky little virus. So for longer than most, they retained a reluctance to allow people in without at least the minimum number of jabs. I forget how many that was and frankly, no longer care. So it was sayonara to that one. This trip was originally Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Israel’s been dropped for obvious reasons and I have to admit to a little trepidation regarding the other destinations at this stage as we taxi down the Brisbane Airport runway. This is not how you should feel when heading off on vacation. I used to feel this way occasionally when heading off on work trips. To Iran for example, which is somewhat topical at the moment and somewhere I’ve been five times.

Which brings us somewhat dubiously to The Dry Argument. I haven’t called this series of travel related streams of consciousness that because we don’t expect to get the odd, okay occasional, okay frequent bevvie. Heaven forbid, I’d rather go to Bali. No, the area is dominated by sand and the the regional arguments are legendary. Hence….. Maybe I should have called this The Dry Merciless or something similar after the atrocious events of recent days.

I have experienced the (very) occasional Dry Argument I have to say if you don’t count the Monday to Wednesday AFD’s – that’d be “alcohol free days” to the drunks reading this. The last and longest was 16 days and the circumstances of the Great London Dry of April’23 are outlined in the essay immediately below this one.

The five trips to Iran were dryish…hat tip Australian Embassy. I’m confident that statement won’t cause the sort of diplomatic incident moving a container load of booze out of the embassy yard to various high-fenced homes caused many years back. Besides, it was sometime last century and there’s surely a statute of limitations on such things.

Pakistan could be a bit that way as well but there was always the old “medicinal purposes” argument that used to cover duty-free back in the day and got one of your bottles of scotch through customs. Or you could temporarily swap your passport for a (“Murrie” I think it was called) beer at the hotel. They already either had your passport or a copy of it at the hotel reception, so it depended on how thirsty you were, whether you complied.

The state of Andhra Pradesh in India once mind-bogglingly elected a prohibition supporting government just prior to one of my many visits to their largest steel plant. This, I’m reasonably sure, was coincidental and not because I was going there. Apparently all of the women voted for it. Had we lived there at the time I know of at least one female vote they wouldn’t have got.

The stories I could tell….over a few beers.

Trepidation notwithstanding, we are on our way. We are on an organised tour so there are at least some locals checking things out prior to our arrival. Locals tend to blend in a lot more than us pasty Australians so if the shit hits the fan we may be on our own anyway, like I was most of the time when I travelled for a living. At least back then the company had kidnapping insurance which is a bit after-the-fact, I know, but while you were fearing for your life there was a glimmer of hope that some ex-SAS types were tracking you down. Not sure how much we can rely on prime minister Albo if those circumstances arise in the next few weeks. They’ll probably have to vet our social media first so I’m f….d.

While we’re on the “dry argument” subject, we’re at Melbourne airport and I just bought a beer and a chardy, big ones admittedly – $36. Bloody Nora! It’s almost worth buying a business class seat just to get into the lounge and access the free booze. I’ll max out the credit card before we leave Melbourne at this rate.

This is the third time I’ve attempted to finish this intro but we’ve just passed through Dubai airport and there are things here you just have to talk about. For the uninitiated, it’s the world’s longest shopping mall. Thank God we weren’t in a similar hurry to our dash through Heathrow six months ago (see below) because we had to get from one end of the airport to almost the other. Instead of a stroke I just tweaked a calf – the old-man’s injury. With hours to spare we passed through at the speed of a goat through an anaconda so the step-count was up but the blood pressure was kept manageable.

Five minutes after getting off the Dubai flight from Aus I was mightily pissed off at the 6 and 8 seater golf-type buggies chirping their way in and out of numerous traffic snarls. Half an hour into our treck to the next Emirate (flight or country, take your pick), I understood why they were there.

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.