Wednesday August 21 – At Sea

We have heard rumours that by Saturday, the Australian bad weather will reach us.  For this reason, the choir is going to perform earlier than scheduled as the venue for their performance this time is The Princess theatre.  This is up the front of the ship where rough seas are felt the most.  Nobody wants people falling off their stools while they sing.

I had a reading day and tonight we went to watch Ace McDermott, an Australian mentalist perform his tricks.  He had a man on stage teaching him how to cut a string into several pieces and knot it together, only to find that the know had disappeared and the string was whole again.  At one stage he got a man to choose one of two books, open it at a random page and read a long word on that page.  The man told him that the word was lumberjack.  Not so exciting until he removed his coat to show that his black t shirt sported this exact same word in large white writing.

Tuesday August 20 – At Sea

 We are sailing in the southern Pacific Ocean on a latitude the same as Caloundra.  The day is warm with clear blue skies and calm seas.  I believe it is not so calm in Eastern Australia, with 100 km per hour winds. 

I watched the movie, The Catcher Was a Spy.  A most interesting story based on fact.  The catcher was an American baseball player, Mo Berg, who was sent to kill Heisenberg because the Americans believed he was making a bomb for the Nazis during the second world war.

Tonight we had an Elton John tribute by Greg Andrew.  He did not have Elton’s voice but he was a great piano player and wore the glasses and a coat modeled on that worn by Elton.  He had a good likeness to his idol and told a story of how he was performing in one area of Norway while Elton John was performing in another area of the same country.  The press got it wrong and had a picture of him in the papers, purporting him to be the real thing.

Monday August 19 – Bora Bora

This island is absolutely stunning.  It has been described as a jewel.  The emerald green island is surrounded by the turquoise sea, which in turn is surrounded by coral reefs which are described as a string of pearls.

I did a tour of the island in Le Truck.  This is a colourful bus with open windows for fresh air.  One of the passengers lost his hat through the window but a good Samaritan chased after our bus and retuned the lost hat.  This is island life for you.

We saw the bread fruit hanging on the trees.  This was the food that Captain Bligh had come to acquire to feed the English slaves working on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  We also saw kapok trees.  We went to Bloody Mary’s Restaurant and Bar with its wall of fame that highlights notable celebrity patrons.  We saw the condominiums owned by Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson.

The most interesting part of the trip was seeing the crab holes.  At first I thought this was a boring stop but when our guide threw some bougainvillea and some leaves over the holes, the crabs came out to collect their food.  They would have been the size of a child’s hand.  Our guide told us that the locals love to eat them but they are too small at the moment.  Hence  they keep feeding them until they increase in size.  The crabs were interesting.  They would pull the flowers to their hole but another crab would come and grab the potential food source from his rival.

We had a pareo demonstration:  How to tie them in five different ways and also how the locals do the tie dying.

Bill went swimming with the sharks and the stingrays.  I thought he was very brave after Steve Irwin’s experience but he survived and enjoyed the experience.  He said the stingrays were like little puppy dogs coming up to you for a feed.  They felt like velvet to touch.  They were told not to touch the sharks and the sharks would leave them alone.  Such faith!  Bill here. We went to two snorkelling locations. Both beautiful but different. At the first, the bird and stingrays came around to be fed by the three local guys who ran the excursion for Princess while the black tip sharks circled ominously but seemingly not interested in proceedings. The second location had the most beautiful coral and a huge variety of sea life. The crew kept us all entertained with guitar and ukulele melodies on the way home. The colour of the sea is the vision that will always be engraved in my memory.