Friday, 10 April 2009
Monday, 23 March 2009
Bill's Epilogue
The only low bit on the the whole holiday was Iberia losing our largest suitcase and then - after they'd located and delivered it - finding that they must have abandoned it on the tarmac during the cloudburst at the time of our boarding at the terribly disorganised Rio International Airport because the clothes in the top half were totally saturated. Luckily the wet hadn't quite reached Val's souvenir watercolour pictures and photographs.
The whole of the rest of the holiday was like skipping from peak to peak on the Andean summits. How can you pick the best of the best? I guess making friends with all those people - Mike and Margaret, Val and Keith, Jim and Ellen, Dermot (can't spell it the Irish way as he does) and Ann, Rachel, Mike the Cruise Director, DJ Drew and all the wonderful ship's stewards - must rate tops of all. But it's closely followed by my tango in La Boca (my - what a sexy dance!) the glaciers down the Beagle Channel, rounding Cape Horn and Val taking over as DJ in the Crow's Nest.
I'm really glad that we did it. It has been the best just-the-two-of-us holiday ever. Very skeptical over the idea of cruising ("cooped up at sea with a lot of people even older than me") for a long time, I am a total convert now. Geographically and historically it was just so, so fascinating. And it was great for the nostalgia of visiting again where Duncan's then Shana's great American adventure started - the juncture at which the Horner clan finally uprooted from the head of a Yorkshire river where their ancestors' Viking longboat ran aground so many generations ago - and crossed the "big pond"!
The whole of the rest of the holiday was like skipping from peak to peak on the Andean summits. How can you pick the best of the best? I guess making friends with all those people - Mike and Margaret, Val and Keith, Jim and Ellen, Dermot (can't spell it the Irish way as he does) and Ann, Rachel, Mike the Cruise Director, DJ Drew and all the wonderful ship's stewards - must rate tops of all. But it's closely followed by my tango in La Boca (my - what a sexy dance!) the glaciers down the Beagle Channel, rounding Cape Horn and Val taking over as DJ in the Crow's Nest.
I'm really glad that we did it. It has been the best just-the-two-of-us holiday ever. Very skeptical over the idea of cruising ("cooped up at sea with a lot of people even older than me") for a long time, I am a total convert now. Geographically and historically it was just so, so fascinating. And it was great for the nostalgia of visiting again where Duncan's then Shana's great American adventure started - the juncture at which the Horner clan finally uprooted from the head of a Yorkshire river where their ancestors' Viking longboat ran aground so many generations ago - and crossed the "big pond"!
Friday, 20 March 2009
Rio de Janeiro and journey home 2
I said Sergita was a barrel of laughs. You have to imagine someone, whose native tongue is Brazilian Portuguese, with verbal diarrhoea in three languages who tries to put on a Bronx New York accent for all of them. At the end of every oration he'd say: "Ya unstand evvyfin? Yaa - righhh! Ya wai' 'ere an' ah get ze ticks (tickets). Ya unstand evvyfin? Yaa - righhh!
And thus we proceded as the coach disgorged us into smaller minibuses and thence to even smaller minibuses as the road upto Corcovado went into ever tighter and narrower hairpins.
I can't do justice to the statue as it keeps appearing and disappearing - just like the Ascension - in the clouds which seem to swathe the pinnacle much of the time - nor can the photos which we'll try to download to the other site today. You just have to go there. The carved face of the statue (itself 3 metres high) is remarkably beautiful but you never seem to see it reproduced on the postcards. Perhaps it's considered disrespectful - or just that they don't want to affect anyone's own mind picture of Jesus.
Rio's International Airport is a bit of a let down - to put it mildly. It serves 40M residents of RDJ state - and more plus all the tourists who are "flying down to Rio" and it's about the size of East Midlands Airport. It has one bar with a Nescafé coffee dispenser (out of order when we were there). Hello - this is Brazil where there's supposed to be an awful lot of it! In fact, we didn't get a decent cup of coffeee in the whole of South America compared to the one we had back at Barcelona Airport! I blame my "betes noires" - the likes of Nestlé and General Foods for that! Virtually everyone we met in South America was so helpful and friendly - amazingly and touchingly so! Not at Rio Airport where they only do their café services and announcements in Portuguese and think they're doing you a great favour to even bother serving you. They should sack the lot and replace them with the enthusiastic but polite shoe-shine boys on the other side of the entrance doors. Our flight didn't even appear on the few departing flights screens. We found we were leaving through lemming-like movement towards the gates just as a terrific thunderstorm broke. It was then we discovered the whole place leaked like a colander. We hoped to get some more of the blog done in our 4 spare hours at Barcelona but Iberia lost one of our cases - the one with all the presents and souvenirs - and my clothes in - so we spent nearly all our timwe there at the lost luggage desk. We've been promised that it will arrive today. We'll see!
And thus we proceded as the coach disgorged us into smaller minibuses and thence to even smaller minibuses as the road upto Corcovado went into ever tighter and narrower hairpins.
I can't do justice to the statue as it keeps appearing and disappearing - just like the Ascension - in the clouds which seem to swathe the pinnacle much of the time - nor can the photos which we'll try to download to the other site today. You just have to go there. The carved face of the statue (itself 3 metres high) is remarkably beautiful but you never seem to see it reproduced on the postcards. Perhaps it's considered disrespectful - or just that they don't want to affect anyone's own mind picture of Jesus.
Rio's International Airport is a bit of a let down - to put it mildly. It serves 40M residents of RDJ state - and more plus all the tourists who are "flying down to Rio" and it's about the size of East Midlands Airport. It has one bar with a Nescafé coffee dispenser (out of order when we were there). Hello - this is Brazil where there's supposed to be an awful lot of it! In fact, we didn't get a decent cup of coffeee in the whole of South America compared to the one we had back at Barcelona Airport! I blame my "betes noires" - the likes of Nestlé and General Foods for that! Virtually everyone we met in South America was so helpful and friendly - amazingly and touchingly so! Not at Rio Airport where they only do their café services and announcements in Portuguese and think they're doing you a great favour to even bother serving you. They should sack the lot and replace them with the enthusiastic but polite shoe-shine boys on the other side of the entrance doors. Our flight didn't even appear on the few departing flights screens. We found we were leaving through lemming-like movement towards the gates just as a terrific thunderstorm broke. It was then we discovered the whole place leaked like a colander. We hoped to get some more of the blog done in our 4 spare hours at Barcelona but Iberia lost one of our cases - the one with all the presents and souvenirs - and my clothes in - so we spent nearly all our timwe there at the lost luggage desk. We've been promised that it will arrive today. We'll see!
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Rio de Janeiro, Day 2 and journey home
18 March. Woke about 6am. Had to pinch myself to realise that I was awake and not in one of those bizarre teetering-on-a-cliff-edge nightmares. 25 floors up with "pterodactyls" coming at you .... Anyway, it's a beautiful morning and the views along Copacabana beach - with the joggers out already - along with the tractors out making it pristine again for the sunbathers, volleyballers and, of course, footballers of Rio. Another cruise liner is coming into the bay with another few thousand passengers training their binoculars on Christo el Redentor - then me - in my boxers!
30th floor breakfast by the pool. When do those scraggy wheeling, frigate birds ever eat? Maybe they’re – like us – just enjoying the view! On the one side, there’s the breathtaking view of the Copacabana beach and beyond to Ipanema. On the other, there’s the mountainside and the favela creeping ever further up it with every ravine filled with the trash from them. No roads, no water mains, no drains, no legal electricity! In Santiago, it was the rich who keep on moving up the hill leaving the poor to take over the atmosphere of exhaust fumes in the centre of the city. In Rio, it’s the poor who look down upon the rich! And Christ looks down on them all from Corcorvado – “the hunchback” – an amazingly steep 2300 feet climb from the sea-level city. Our visit to this most famous of statues is the reason we’re up again so early.
Our “Italtur” bus this morning arrives – unlike yesterday – on time. But, this time messes up on who should be going on which tour and, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, we have to all switch buses. So we lose our female guide who has not yet spoken a word of commentary and looks about to have a nervous breakdown and gain Sergio – a blonde she-male (fresh from Mardi Gras) who is a real barrel of laughs. He’s working hard towards the full sex change – pity about the baritone voice and lack of waist – but everything else there – or not – as the case may be! Wonder if the complete job will put paid to his football hooligan vocabulary every time he passes a soccer stadium – of which, in Rio, there are many. You have to take your hat off to ol’ Sergita, though, in the time it took for the coach to flash past the Governor’s Mansion – the Guanabana Palace – he’d given us the spiel in Portuguese, Spanish and English (and he reckoned he could have got in Italian and French too if we’d had any on board!)
When we reached the World Cup stadium, we obviously had to disembark and prostrate ourselves before the statue of the 1962 Jules Rimmet-winning Brazilian captain.
All the favelas (about 400 of them up the various hills of the city) have their own “Sunday Schools” dedicated (mainly) to practising to become the top dog for outrageous self exhibitionism in next year’s Mardi Gras Carnaval. Some of these Sunday Schools are 4 to 5 thousand strong and the city has a huge strip – like a football stadium elongated over a mile or so – on which the whole thing takes place and which they can use every Sunday for practice.
One should mention here “La Cultura de las Nalgas” in South America as whole and in Brazil, in particular. Here, if a lady asks you “Does my bum look big in this?” The wise answer is very much in the affirmative – like “Absolutely humungous, darling!”
30th floor breakfast by the pool. When do those scraggy wheeling, frigate birds ever eat? Maybe they’re – like us – just enjoying the view! On the one side, there’s the breathtaking view of the Copacabana beach and beyond to Ipanema. On the other, there’s the mountainside and the favela creeping ever further up it with every ravine filled with the trash from them. No roads, no water mains, no drains, no legal electricity! In Santiago, it was the rich who keep on moving up the hill leaving the poor to take over the atmosphere of exhaust fumes in the centre of the city. In Rio, it’s the poor who look down upon the rich! And Christ looks down on them all from Corcorvado – “the hunchback” – an amazingly steep 2300 feet climb from the sea-level city. Our visit to this most famous of statues is the reason we’re up again so early.
Our “Italtur” bus this morning arrives – unlike yesterday – on time. But, this time messes up on who should be going on which tour and, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, we have to all switch buses. So we lose our female guide who has not yet spoken a word of commentary and looks about to have a nervous breakdown and gain Sergio – a blonde she-male (fresh from Mardi Gras) who is a real barrel of laughs. He’s working hard towards the full sex change – pity about the baritone voice and lack of waist – but everything else there – or not – as the case may be! Wonder if the complete job will put paid to his football hooligan vocabulary every time he passes a soccer stadium – of which, in Rio, there are many. You have to take your hat off to ol’ Sergita, though, in the time it took for the coach to flash past the Governor’s Mansion – the Guanabana Palace – he’d given us the spiel in Portuguese, Spanish and English (and he reckoned he could have got in Italian and French too if we’d had any on board!)
When we reached the World Cup stadium, we obviously had to disembark and prostrate ourselves before the statue of the 1962 Jules Rimmet-winning Brazilian captain.
All the favelas (about 400 of them up the various hills of the city) have their own “Sunday Schools” dedicated (mainly) to practising to become the top dog for outrageous self exhibitionism in next year’s Mardi Gras Carnaval. Some of these Sunday Schools are 4 to 5 thousand strong and the city has a huge strip – like a football stadium elongated over a mile or so – on which the whole thing takes place and which they can use every Sunday for practice.
One should mention here “La Cultura de las Nalgas” in South America as whole and in Brazil, in particular. Here, if a lady asks you “Does my bum look big in this?” The wise answer is very much in the affirmative – like “Absolutely humungous, darling!”
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Rio de Janeiro
Arrived here about 10 last night. What an awesome sight cruising into this bay with our first sight of the Sugar Loaf mountain and the statue of Christ the Redeemer on the twice as high Corcovado mountain. We were really sorry and quite emotional to leave our lovely ship and friends. We now have a fantastic view of Copacabana beach from our 25th floor sea view room. A bit scarey out on the balcony. This afternoon we've toured the city, seen Ipanema Beach, the fantastic modern cathedral which seats 4000 and been up Sugar Loaf in the cable car! Ipanema means dangerous water in the local Indian language and you can see why! The waves are absolutely mountainous and crash onto the beach like thunder sending plumes of spume up as high as a building. What a contrast from the gentleness of "The Girl From Ipanema"! On the top of the granite Sugar Loaf we saw marmoset monkeys and the fantastic view of the bay. The frigate birds wheeling around give the place a sort of primeval feel because they look like pterodactyls!
20% of the 8 milion RDJ inhabitants live in the favelas which climb up the mountains all around. They're all illegal and have only steps up the steep mountainsides to them but I guess they have the best views from their shacks they could have in all the world. Tomorrow it's Christ the Redeemer and the long journey home.
20% of the 8 milion RDJ inhabitants live in the favelas which climb up the mountains all around. They're all illegal and have only steps up the steep mountainsides to them but I guess they have the best views from their shacks they could have in all the world. Tomorrow it's Christ the Redeemer and the long journey home.
Monday, 16 March 2009
Last day at sea
Well here we are preparing to leave. We are enjoying our second day at sea since leaving MV. We will dock in Rio tonight and leave tomorrow morning. We have to pack, dreading that bit. We had a great formal dinner last night and then went onto a show and then a dance afterwards, another long evening but all great fun. The weather is so lovely, we are staying out on deck as much as possible. The sea is as calm as a mill pond we have a great finale show to look forward to this evening. We have met many people who are staying on in Rio for a few days so should hook up with them and keep together for safety! We keep hearing nightmare accounts of scarey situations in Rio but there are single old ladies on this trip so if they can manage I'm sure we will.
If we have time we will add to the blog in Rio, could heartily recommend this cruise to anyone, it has been brilliant.
If we have time we will add to the blog in Rio, could heartily recommend this cruise to anyone, it has been brilliant.
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Montevideo
Left Montevideo later than planned because a thunderstorm would have played havoc with the navigational equipment so vital for negotiating the narrow and very busy River Plate channel. Some vessels passed so close you could see what was written on the t-shirts of those on deck!
MV was a very tranquil city - more like Cadiz than Madrid or Barcelona. Again we were impressed by the courtesy, kindness and friendliness of the people we met. We didn't need the Policia Turista posted on just about every corner of the city especially to look after the the 2 cruiseline lots of passengers visiting. Just about everybody was one-handed anyway - a flask of hotwater tucked under their arms and a gourd of maté being sucked through a "bombilla" - a silver straw with a filter at the end. (This afternoon, on deck, we're going to be shown how to prepare and drink maté from all the souvenir gourd + bombillas we've bought!) Pity the tourist police had been employed the night before to stop thieves removing all the drain covers from the main pedestrian street in the city. We found and made use of some wonderful aresania markets but everything in the city shut down at 2pm except for the Port Market where they were barbecuing what seemed like the entire contents of the city's butchers' shops. Amidst tables groaning under the weight of incinerated cattle flesh, there seemed to be the remnants of Uruguay's month-long Mardi Gras "carnaval" going on.
Sea a bit rough last night. We watched first film on-board: Slumdog Millionaire. Really great!!
Today, we've just finished a 5km charity walk for breast cancer: 12 times around Deck 3. Going for a shower now! Bill
MV was a very tranquil city - more like Cadiz than Madrid or Barcelona. Again we were impressed by the courtesy, kindness and friendliness of the people we met. We didn't need the Policia Turista posted on just about every corner of the city especially to look after the the 2 cruiseline lots of passengers visiting. Just about everybody was one-handed anyway - a flask of hotwater tucked under their arms and a gourd of maté being sucked through a "bombilla" - a silver straw with a filter at the end. (This afternoon, on deck, we're going to be shown how to prepare and drink maté from all the souvenir gourd + bombillas we've bought!) Pity the tourist police had been employed the night before to stop thieves removing all the drain covers from the main pedestrian street in the city. We found and made use of some wonderful aresania markets but everything in the city shut down at 2pm except for the Port Market where they were barbecuing what seemed like the entire contents of the city's butchers' shops. Amidst tables groaning under the weight of incinerated cattle flesh, there seemed to be the remnants of Uruguay's month-long Mardi Gras "carnaval" going on.
Sea a bit rough last night. We watched first film on-board: Slumdog Millionaire. Really great!!
Today, we've just finished a 5km charity walk for breast cancer: 12 times around Deck 3. Going for a shower now! Bill
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