Second & Third sea days after Mumbai

Thursday April 9 2009 - Our main focus of today was to make a decision on our tour in Safaga. At the moment, we‘re booked with Princess for a full day tour, but we‘ve been offered the same tour plus extras, by private vehicle, for less than half the Princess price. Looks like I’m going to cancel the Princess tour and go along with the private tour, there will be ten of us in a private vehicle supplied by www.memphistours.net . We won trivia this morning after a tie breaker ‘what acrobatic move does a skunk make before spraying?’ we collected our coupons, added them to our others and exchanged them for valuable prizes (ie ‘junk’). I spent some time in the sun and the pool in the afternoon and In the evening, we watched the movie ‘Valkyrie’ which was on the theatre yesterday and on television today, the movies onboard have been very good, surprisingly, with a lot of recently released titles. Things I missed today, ‘a tour of the galley’, ‘a special lecture on Dubai’, ‘the passenger talent show’, oh well you can’t see everything.


Friday April 10 2009 - This morning according to the ships info channel we’re 216 miles from Dubai, it’s 26 degC (79 degF) and the sea is calm. The water has been amazingly flat crossing the Arabian Sea, today we will pass through the Strait of Hormuz, that’s the narrow gateway to the Persian Gulf where the Arabian peninsula juts out toward the Iranian mainland. It’s a busy area as it’s the only access to the oil rich areas of this part of the world, I expect we’ll see more than a few tankers. I spent my usual couple of hours in the sun in the afternoon, then ran around with Izzy arranging a last minute private tour in Dubai, we got a ten seater bus with driver for $250 for ten hours and we needed some more people to share the costs, fortunately that didn’t prove too difficult. In the evening we went to see comedy impressionist, Tony pace, he was very good.


Maintenance guys work on the new equipment



During the day I noticed some unusual activity on the lowest outside deck, the promenade deck about twenty feet above the water. Maintenance guys were rigging pipes with spray heads on them, clamped to the railing, overhanging the edge of the ship. It seems that they are being readied to spray the sides of the ship with water, without someone actually standing there, it would appear designed to make it more difficult to climb up the side of the ship. Tonight, I noticed, for the first time, a security guard patrolling the same deck.

The new nozzles installed every 20 feet or so













Hose lies waiting for attachment












PS. The answer to yesterday’s trivia tie breaker was ‘a handstand’

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