Tuesday August 13 – At Sea

The map on the TV screen showing where we are going is wrong.  It shows us travelling west with Pitcairn behind us.  Bill thought he had gone to sleep for three days and had missed sailing around the island.  When we went to lunch today he mentioned this to the Captain who is a very precise man.  He said this has been a problem since the map was done in Holland several years ago.  He finds it very annoying that they cannot fix it. 

I went to a talk on land and sea cruises.  Princess is now combining the two in Canada and Japan and Vietnam.  James gave a talk on Pitcairn.  He spent time on the island last year.  There are only 50 people on the island and they are getting old.  After the children have been away to school in New Zealand there is no work for them on the island so they stay in New Zealand.  The islanders have offered free land to anyone who would like to come and live on the island to increase the population but as yet only one person has taken up this offer.  He is a man who worked for Shell and is computer literate, but the islanders do not make use of his skills.  He does not believe that living on the island is working out for him.

Bill is continuing with choir and line dancing but I still cannot lift or rotate my arm.  The songs for the last performance of the choir are: “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”, “Summer of ‘69”, “This is Me”, “Uptown Girl”, “Memory”, “Don’t Stop Me Now”, and for the inevitable encore “Dancing Queen”. Our entertainer tonight was a multi-instrumentalist called Salvatore Hasard.  He played the saxophone, the drums, the piano and the guitar.  His voice had a wide range and he sang the song from the Bandaid Concert, singing the different parts of the song in all the different voices of the people who participated in that concert for Africa. 

Filipina, Trevor, Mark, Barbara