Thursday April 24th 2008
Noon position: 36 degrees 16' North, 8 degrees 2' West (course 118 degrees, 21 knots).
Bob: After breakfast and Walk-A-Mile, we attended another of Dr. Ryan's lectures, this one on the Inca Empire in pre-Conquest South America. The extent and integration of the empire was amazing, but much of their history was lost when the Franciscans burned the pre-Conquest historical records. Dr. Ryan's pictures of, and tales about, Machu Pichu were quite fascinating, even his travel on the burro he named "Hemmorhoids". I was, of course, extremely skeptical about those Incan roads being landing runways for ancient spacecraft, but they certainly were astonishingly long, wide, linear, and smoothly surfaced. Also surprising was the absolutely abrupt way they ended rather than, say, gradually decreasing in width as they reached their end points. Dr. Ryan said the penalty for a commoner using those royal roads was to lose a foot, which for sheer brutality certainly rivaled the Draconian Codes. But the Spanish also engaged in unprecedented brutality during and after the Conquest. Dr. Ryan showed pictures of one church with the bodies of 60,000 natives buried in the floor whose only crime was refusing to convert to Christianity, for which they were killed by the Inquisition. Other entire tribes were slaughtered or enslaved, and slavery was often pretty much the same thing as a death sentence because the average life span for slaves assigned to the silver mines was only 3 days! The Arawaks were completely wiped out and I have read accounts of Arawaks who committed suicide rather than submit to Spanish slavery. Such a horrible legacy. |
Monika: I woke up at 1:00 AM and we were still anchored, but when I woke up around 3 AM we were steaming full speed ahead. I went to back to sleep. Two more sea days seemed not to be such an imposition. Especially since the cruise staff went out of their way to provide entertainment. Of course, there was always walk-a-mile out on the deck. Also, they brought back the destination lecturer, and this morning he gave us his lecture on the Incas. Since this was his specialty in history, he was very knowledgeable, had great pictures and was an entertaining story teller. After that, we went to the Casino. Our Platinum voucher book had several vouchers, where we could win an extra $5.-- if we bet $5.-- at the roulette table on the 50/50 choices. Well since we had four of these coupons, Bob and I each took two coupons, bet against each other and since neither 0 nor 00 came up, we earned $10.--. As gambling goes, not bad. |
Bob: We read a bit for the rest of the morning, and fortunately "The Babe Magnet" was a lot more cheerful than the morning history lesson. After lunch we stopped off at a cooking demonstration that included a chef, a sous chef, and a really talented guy who carved fruits and vegetables and assembled the pieces into really cute animals. I had no idea that there were 13 kitchens on board, or that the meat they used was aged for 28 days! Who knew? Monika was so impressed by the cooking that she bought a cookbook authored by the chef, which he also kindly autographed for her. |
Monika: Back in our cabin, we found a letter from the captain, explaining our problems and giving us the following benefits: $100 ship board credits for each missed port. Credit of the $21 port fee for each port and to top it all, we could use 20% of what we paid for this cruise on our next cruise. I thought that RCI was more then generous in compensating us for a problem. After all, the contract clearly states, that the itenerary could be changed at any time. However, it seems that not all the people were happy with this. It seemed to me that they just saw $$$$$. The captain even had a question and answer session, which Vicky told us had turned into a "rip the captain apart" session. Later on, some people tried to start a mutiny in the promenade. I have no sympathy for these people. We have a lovely 14 days cruise, with great accomodations, great food, great service, and good entertainment, and they want to get it for free because they did not get to spend half a day in Cadiz and one day in Mallaga. The captain promised to send the complaints on to headquarters. Throughout this whole process, I was impressed, how open the captain had been and how much he tried to keep us informed on what was going on. It was quite obvious how frustrated he was with the whole situation and a little more compassion on the part of the guests would not have hurt them. |
Bob: Then Monika went to watch Jeff and Helen participate in the afternoon trivia game while I returned to the cabin for my afternoon nap. But that gave me enough energy for our afternoon dance lesson, which turned out to be another Salsa lesson. Since that cruise marked my first attempt at Salsa-ing, I really appreciated the second lesson where we had both a quick review of the basic steps plus two variations of underarm turns and an open "twinkle" kind of variation of the cumba (sp?) step. That all together gave me enough variety of action that I would be willing to do a salsa, and it seems like I could try that for any basic 4-count Latin-style music. That will hopefully save me from having to learn meringue, and that's good because I already feel stupid enough having to learn to do a condiment dance without having to learn some kind of dessert step, too. I mean, I'm willing to sing for my supper but having to learn a different dance for each item on the menu (the "Mashed Potato", the "Chicken Dance", etc.), strikes me as extreme. We had another nice dinner with the gang, during which we learned of the revolution brewing above decks. That is, some passengers were very disgruntled at having to skip two ports. First they grilled the Captain during a question-and-answer session, during which apparently one Hispanic guy accused the Captain of lying about the ship's condition when we left Ft. Lauderdale and demanded to see all the repair records for the ship. Not satisfied with those answers, apparently some German started collecting names for a possible class action suit and also organized a protest demonstration on the Promenade area in the middle of the ship. Now we, of course, were as happy as clams and blissfully ignorant of all these undercurrents around the ship. I thought of making a sign protesting the lack of raisins in the bread pudding and joining the demonstration, but somehow I don't think the rebels would have appreciated my participation. At the end of dinner we passed through the Straits of Gilbraltar. Unfortunately, the air was a bit hazy and we were over next to the Africa side of the channel, so the pictures of "The Rock" were not as sharp as I would have liked. The pictures of the African coast, however, were quite clear and that was a surprisingly high set of white cliffs, something like the cliffs of Dover. |
Monika: Anyway, we had an unanticipated benefit of all of this in that we passed the Rock of Gibraltar during daylight hours, actually right during dinner time and I did not finish my roast beef and didn't have desert so that I could take pictures of The Rock and of the African coast. We actually were closer to the African coast than to Europe and I got my first pictures of Africa. Of course, we had a "We were here" picture taken with The Rock in the background. |
Bob: We also tried to attend the evening performance by Da Vinci, a group of three singers, but once again the sound guy was over-amplifying them, particularly the tenor. When all three were singing and the band was playing full blast, the sound levels forced me to once agin put my fingers in my ears (I had forgotten my earplugs back in the cabin). That just wasn't fun, so we finally gave up and went outside to watch the sunset toward the stern of the ship. The same haze that had interferred with our view of Gilbraltar gave us a gloriously ruddy sunset, so that was nice. Back in the cabin I turned on our MP3 player to listen to some Schubert songs sung by Friedrich Fischer-Dieskau and we read until it was time to sleep. |
Monika: The evening program was a highly forgettable male trio. They tried to appear classical (tuxedoes) but sang contemporary and musical theater trying to make them sound classical. After having heared on our last cruise (Wanderung 16) what a Juillard trained opera singer can do to a musical theater melody, I know that it really can be quite lovely to have really trained voices sing musical theater, but this was not it. The bass was actually quite good, the baritone ok, but the tenor was so overamped when he screamed out his high notes, that Bob and I had to hold our ears and so we left after the first three sets. |
| Prolog | Map of Trip | Epilog |
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